Apartment Story
by Donnistar
Summary: Johnny didn't like kids, but he didn't like killing them either. The strange purple-haired girl with the serious eyes had to go somewhere. Now she's Johnny's problem and Edgar's both. It's not much of a foundation to build a family out of, but it's not like either of them has much experience. (Slight AU, slight Invader Zim crossover).
1. Folks Who Don't Mean Well

_Jhonen Vasquez wrote a lovely essay at the beginning of "Squee!" about how important it is to sometimes work on projects that are more creative indulgences than legitimate attempts at creating greatness or sophistication. _

_So I followed his advice. And wrote this. _

_It's as much of an indulgence as I can bear to reveal to public eyes. When I started out working on it (last year!) I honestly just expected it to be a temporary project before it fizzled out, and certainly never had any intention of posting it. Then, the next thing I knew, I was finishing up a 100k story that had seemingly come out of nowhere. I wrote what I liked writing, which it turns out is a LOT of character-driven plot, interactions, and some supernatural stuff thrown in for good measure. "Apartment Story" has been a really great writing experience and, perhaps just as important, I ended up being quite fond it and its universe, which is why I've decided to upload it to FFN._

_This is going to be a bit of a slow-burning story, but I hope that the payoff will be worth it. In my opinion it doesn't really get good/build up momentum for a while, so if you like the concept but aren't a huge fan of the first few chapters, maybe come back around chapter seven or eight and there might be more for you. _

_Warnings? Expect some Nny-typical violence and swearing, though not quite on the level of canon JtHM. No sexual content that I can think of, and no slash, really. Maybe some, like, pre-slash hinting, or slash-if-you-squint, but nothing consummated. Think of it more of as BROTP kidfic kind of thing. Like Full House but with manslaughter instead of a laugh track. _

* * *

**Chapter 1: Folks Who Don't Mean Well**

_"Hey Montana, take your daughter back  
It's clear she needs your care  
These bustling streets are icy veins  
Of a beast who snuffs her prayer  
Her bones and the truth show through"_

Every town had its darker corners.

Johnny had frequented them more often in the past. Back when the thing behind the wall demanded a sacrifice and Johnny's murders were of necessity rather than personal expression. Reach into the crowd down here and you were far more likely to grab someone who deserved to be dismembered or filled with bees or turned inside-out.

After all, he'd made at least one mistake before. Killed at least one person who didn't need killing. Johnny had hated the idea of re-living that.

Now he didn't really need to visit these parts of town anymore. These dark roads half-lit with grimy streetlights, oil and scuffmarks and puke on every surface, every building with at least three broken windows. Always the smell of broken-down cars and broken-down people and maybe the pitifully too-late burn of bleach. The sounds of sirens and crying children rang out constantly, punctuated with an occasional gunshot.

Johnny always spazzed and froze for a second at these. "Gunshy" was pretty mild term for it.

No, Johnny didn't really need to come down here to the bad side of the tracks - it was his insomnia that did it. People always thought it sounded nice to not have to sleep. "All that extra time on your hands!" they'd say excitedly, imagining a world of non-stop productivity. Before Johnny whacked their fingers off, anyway.

The thing is, eight more hours a day is an awful lot more _existing_. Especially when you're insane.

Johnny could only read and watch TV and attempt to draw and flay people for so long before he started itching to get out of the house. It wore him thinnest in the evenings, when he felt more comfortable taking long walks to contemplate the horrors of reality and the frustrations of his goddamned 12:00-blinking VCR. At least in the bad part of town, people didn't find his appearance quite so shocking.

Still, the whole place reeked of Hell. Johnny should know. All it needed was a moon with a giant pupil in the center.

So he walked. Never staying in one place for long, never admiring the scenery or smell, always moving on. There was a big loop he could make if he headed down Morgan Avenue and turned at the Taco Hell and headed back up toward his house. It took almost exactly forty-five minutes. An hour if he stopped for a taquito.

Tonight it would take two.

It hadn't been such a bad walk up until this point. He hadn't even seen that creepy Chihuahua.

Johnny stalked down the broken sidewalk with his hands jammed into his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the cold and filth of the world. Generally he stared at the ground as he went. It let him avoid any unnecessary contact with the local wildlife - eye contact seemed to serve as a threat down here. As much as Johnny loved a good eviscerating session, he didn't' always savor the confrontations that spurred them on.

He watched the ground. He ignored the weirdoes and homeless insane that he passed by, the destitute and lonely, and he especially ignored the girl in the tidy brown flats who accidentally brushed shoulders with him as he passed her near a street corner. Johnny winced at the human contact, shrinking away, and would have likely never thought about it again if she hadn't called after him.

"Um, excuse me, sir -" she said, once he'd cleared a good ten feet beyond her.

Johnny didn't realize at first that she was speaking to him. He tuned out most of the sounds of the city, and the words of others most especially. They garbled his mind.

"Guy in the boots! Excuse me!" she tried again. This was harder to ignore.

He turned on his heel to see a woman standing there - shadow-thin in the pale light, with dark-ringed eyes and ratty purple hair. Probably around his age. She must have been very bad-off, because she was holding a child in her arms instead of scooting it around in a stroller.

The child gave a strangled cry and Johnny turned away from them. It was a real shame, he thought, that children had to grow up in this sort of place. Always in darkness, never clean, surrounded by weakness and vice. Most of the jerkoffs who lived here built their own grimy holes to live in, but the kids didn't get a choice. They didn't really get a shot at avoiding all the downfalls of their elders.

Which is not to say that he _liked_ children, particularly. They still had brains and breathed and ate and did all the other disgusting things that organisms do. He just blamed them less for it.

"Wait, mister -" the woman called out from somewhere behind him. Johnny walked a little faster.

He heard the quick tapping of footsteps growing nearer and hunched his shoulders as he went.

"Mister, I think that I might -" she said, and he could tell by her voice that she was right behind him. Johnny twisted his head, meaning to tell her off for following him, but she grabbed his arm with her free hand.

"Stop that," he snapped, shaking her off. She was very close to him now - he saw the nasty bloody spiderwebbing in her eyes and could smell the tang of moldered sweat.

"I know you."

"No, you don't."

"Yes. I'm sure I do."

"That's not possible," he said, darkly, hoping that she would get the hint, feeling disgust and the sick jitter-shake of bloodlust beginning to roil at having this stranger annoy him so.

_She's got a kid. Keep it together. Next guy who gives you a dirty look at the store is fair game._

Johnny glanced down at the child in her arms – she had purple hair like her mother's gathered in a clashing pink bow. The kid was awake now, and stared up at him without a hint of a smile on her chubby face.

"Yes, it is," the mother insisted. "You lived in that - " and she pointed back down the street, "In that ratty old house in Biloxi Parrish."

"If you'd been there, you'd be dead by now," Johnny said, speaking through tightly-ground teeth.

"But I think-"

Something snapped in his mind. He grabbed the woman by the wrist, not bringing her close, but holding her still, so he could get a good look at her round face and brown eyes and -

He'd always liked girls with purple hair.

"A-actually, maybe you're right. I think I must've- must've gotten confused. If you'd just- please, sir, if you'd just -" she stuttered, instantly frightened, a waver in her voice that Johnny heard frequently. She seemed to be rethinking her choice to speak with him. Holding her child very close, shielding the girl from Johnny with her body, she tried to pull away.

He stared at her, hand tight around her wrist, as she grew more frantic. He tried to parcel out exactly why...

But how many girls had he ever known and not killed? Besides Devi, obviously.

The girl wailed and whimpered, her child joining her. It was the kid's crying that shook Johnny out of his fugue state. He looked down at his white-knuckled hand and let go of her with a shaking snap of his fingers.

Whatever deja vu had moved him was gone now. The unpleasantness of the murky street and industrial city sounds came smashing back to him. Johnny grimaced in annoyance; maybe he'd be skipping the taquito tonight.

"You maniac!" the woman shrieked at him, stumbling away in her fright. She clutched her sobbing child so close that Johnny wondered that it wasn't suffocated. Or he would have, if he'd cared and if he wasn't feeling suddenly so bad-tempered.

"Close enough," he spat back at her.

Turning his back, Johnny took a few steps down the sidewalk. He rammed his hands back down into his pockets, glaring at the concrete, trying to shake off the invading grossness of the encounter. Why did people always try to talk to him? Or, rather, why did they always try to harass him? He'd be content, at this point, with being ignored. With being a shade moving through the world, finding his own solace in solitude, but no.

That woman had, admittedly, not seemed to have too much meanness in her, but still. If she'd pushed him a little harder he'd have an extra body to carry home tonight besides his own. Johnny walked slowly as he fussed over this, fingers twitching in his pockets along with thoughts of knives -

And then, a gunshot.

Another.

So close by that Johnny's bones rattled inside of him and his guts seized coldly. Everything was frozen into a single instant of tiny, pressed-in fear.

The second passed. Johnny ran his hands over his stomach and was quite sure he wasn't shot or bleeding, although the all-over quiver of adrenaline might have mislead him.

He glanced back, to see if the woman was still there.

She'd been reduced to a lump on the ground. The streetlight nearby cast a sick, shadowy glow across her still body. There were dark shadows in the rumpled folds of her clothes. Everything seemed black-and-white.

Johnny fought with himself briefly about whether to keep walking. He saw the bundle of the child wriggle like a foot beneath a blanket beside her mother.

Right. The kid.

Johnny walked over to the woman's side, taking meandering steps in the vain hope that she might get up and walk on and he wouldn't have to involve himself in this anymore. She stayed very still. He prodded at her side with the tip of his boot, carefully turning her over, the weight heavy on his toe.

Blood dribbled out of the edge of the girl's mouth. The shiny crimson drew his eye, and Johnny watched the liquid drip down and splash onto the concrete, only inches from the child who'd fallen silent. Johnny's gaze flickered between the dead girl's half-open, sightless eyes and the blinking stare of the little child.

It was very strange, Johnny thought, how a piece of metal the size of his fingernail could so utterly destroy a person. There was something obscene about it.

"Bitch owed me money," someone said.

Johnny snapped his neck toward the voice.

"What?"

"Bitch owed me money," it said again, as its owner inched out of the shadows into the pale light cast by the streetlamp. Some stupid college-aged kid revealed himself, wearing dirty oversized clothes and pointing the muzzle of a gun at the ground with one limp-wristed hand.

"Bitch owed you money," Johnny whispered, staring at him. Revulsion rose up in his stomach like bile and pressed against his throat, threatening a sick fit. His fingers started to twitch at his sides.

"Hey, what're you lookin' so bent out of shape over? You some kinda weirdo?" the guy asked, his head tipped slightly back as he spoke, one eyebrow raised.

Johnny knew that look. It was the face that people made when they were contemplating their shallow superiority. 'Oh, at least I'm not like that guy,' the thug was thinking, had to be thinking, even though Johnny was not the one who'd just gunned down a young mother in a back alley over something as inconsequential as money.

Yeah, sure, Johnny knew he'd probably killed mothers before himself. Probably dozens. But never with guns and never as they stood with their guiltless infant in their arms and never over something as paltry as money.

Johnny was disgusted by his own flimsy attempt at justification but not nearly as disgusted as he was by this diseased excuse of a human being standing three feet away from him, still with a smug expression on his pimpled face.

The guy had started to look bored with the situation. He rolled his eyes and turned on the heel of his untied shoe, stupidly exposing his back. Johnny wouldn't have even needed that.

Lunging forward, Johnny snatched the guy's wrist and yanked him back, rewarded with a grim _snap_ as it bent the wrong way. The gun clattered to the ground amidst the kid's screamed profanity.

"What the FUCK are you doing?"

Johnny slammed the hard tip of his boot into the back of the gunner's calf. It gave beneath him and he toppled backwards, head slamming into the concrete, fumbling for his gun until Johnny pressed his foot against the guy's wrist.

"Me? What the fuck are YOU doing, you shitbug?!"

Swinging his other boot around, Johnny stomped down on the kid's free arm. Both were pinned to the pavement now. Beneath him the delinquent wailed - not for forgiveness, but for blood.

"Gettoffa me, you goddamned fag! I'm going to end your shit! My bros and I are going to beat your skinny ass and then -"

Johnny couldn't stand this guy's voice. It grated on his nerves somewhere around the same pitch as a chain-smoking hairdryer. Time to put a stop to it. He fished around in the side of his boot a bit (the kid's pitiful flailing made it trickier) for the handle of his knife.

The boy kept screaming even as Johnny looked for his knife. "What difference does that bitch's ass mean to you? Were you fucking her or something? She ain't worth the world of shit you're going to be in if you don't -"

There it was. The solid, leg-warmed steel felt good in his palm, and better yet as Johnny lifted the blade and held it a few inches above the filthy thug's face.

"You think that that pussy-ass knife is going to do you any good, gothfag?"

The guy stopped, finally, cold blue eyes staring at the steel. Johnny saw his breath fogging the blade and was annoyed by it.

"As much as I'm enjoying your delightful soliloquy, I'm afraid it's got to be cut short. My walk's already ruined and your obscene verbal diarrhea isn't helping," Johnny said.

"Is that supposed to scare me?" he started up again. "You don't have the guts, you fucking hipster."

And there it was. The trigger. Something about the kid's smug and certain, twisted face and his snarling words and the fact that he didn't care at all made Johnny's mind snap. Same as it had a hundred times before, but always such a surprise.

Johnny felt rage and violence and a sick hunger for the smell of blood shriek out from deep down inside of him and erupt out.

"Guts?! You don't' think I have the guts?! It doesn't take guts to do _this_ -"

With a single swing, Johnny slashed down and across. The thug choked up a gurgling cough, stuttered by blood, and was forced silent.

"Or this - "

Johnny ripped his knife down now, spilling shiny sticky rings across the pavement as the kid gurgled in agony.

"But it takes even less to _do what you did_. I might be a coward but at least I always kill people _myself_."

Johnny did not let some obscene gunpowder machine do the dirty work for him. He hated blood, but knew that that was the price you paid for a proper murder. The kid made horrific sounds, gasping, choking, as his innards voided from his body cavity and brought surges of blood with them.

"Now I've definitely got more guts than he does." Johnny said, allowing himself a low chuckle as he rubbed the blood off of his knife onto the guy's sweatpants. The blood boiling in his brain was cooling now, second by second, bringing him back together.

A little giggle joined him, sounding from behind, and Johnny wheeled around. Jesus, how many people were going to have to get killed tonight before they learned that -

But it wasn't another person. Not another filthy adult, anyway. The dead girl's little daughter had propped herself up beside her mother. The little girl had blood spattered across her pale, chubby face. Crimson clashed and glistened in her violet hair.

"You think that this is funny?" Johnny asked her, pointing toward the body with his knife.

A half-smile had been hovering on her mouth but it vanished as soon as he spoke. Off like a light. Her eyes followed his blade down to the rent-open corpse of her mother's killer and stopped there, gaze fixed on the spilled viscera and exposed bone and blood like the kind that Johnny had accidentally splashed on her.

Johnny looked across at the bodies and the little one settled between them. Something about the arrangement made him uncomfortable. Oh, sure, everything was a little better now that he'd removed what's-his-gun from existence, but...

But killing him certainly hadn't brought the mother back. Johnny didn't even think that the shithead had learned anything.

The little girl kept staring at the body and Johnny didn't like that. He bent down and picked her up until she was standing (she was light as a hunk of Styrofoam). They had a bit of a fuss at each other when she refused to let go of her mother's shirt, tiny fist grasped tightly around the fabric until Johnny's even thinner fingers managed to work her free.

Ugh. Something living so close. Johnny much preferred touching the dead. The child grabbed his shirtsleeve to steady herself as she got to her feet, and he caught a whiff of gasoline coming off of her clothes.

Gasoline? What kind of smell was that for a kid?

A fucking weird one, if you asked him.

The sound of sirens rang out distantly, somewhere deeper in the city. He jerked his head up for a sign of flashing lights but saw none. Not nearly close enough to surprise either of them but close enough to wrangle Johnny's thoughts in a bit. He really ought to be getting on.

But what about the little girl? She wobbled a bit but stood still, perhaps still shaky from all the chaos of a few moments ago.

If he left her here, alone on the ground in the ghetto between two bodies, she was as good as dead already. Fuck, for all he knew a rat could come wandering up out of the sewer and bite her face off. Stranger things happened. He should know, he'd done them.

For a moment he thought about killing her himself. No biggie. The idea of a trio of bodies laid out on the street, sorted by size, struck him as vaguely artistic. He had always been about the art.

That would both eliminate anymore pondering on his part and spare her the fate of dying of exposure out here on a street frequented by crack heads. Win-win, really.

Johnny shifted his grip on the knife. He reared his knife back and locked his wrist, planning to drive it cleanly through the child's soft skull. They had a squishy place right at the top, he thought. No need to draw things out. This was a mercy kill, after all.

The little girl seemed to be ignoring him. She took no notice of his knife poised snake-like above her head. All through his thinking, she kept staring down at what had been her mother.

"Stop that," Johnny said. "There's nothing there. She's really empty now, don't you see?"

No reaction. The blade quivered in his hand.

"Look, for once it's not my fault, so I can say this: I'm sorry. 'Bout your dead mom and all. Must be tough. But they don't come back."

No reaction. Johnny grabbed her shoulders, turning her around so that they were eye to eye. Her stillness was beginning to aggravate him and he heard a snarl in his voice when he spoke.

"Will you stop staring at it?! It's freaking me out! You weird little-"

The little girl tore her gaze from her mother to look straight at him. Her eyes were dark hazel and shining, heavily lidded in the harsh streetlight glow, and _fearless_. Not pitiful or sad, not confused or dopey. Perhaps angry if anything - her little body felt stiff beneath his hands and she'd flared her nostrils at him.

He'd seen a look not unlike it before. Once.

They stared at one another. He waited for her gaze to fail, for her to glance at the knife or back down at her dead mother, but she didn't.

Any thoughts he'd kicked around about a third death tonight evaporated. Very slowly, he let the knife fall to his side.

Perhaps a blander or duller child he'd have left to elements. A nastier one he might have dealt with himself. Blade through that soft spot on top of her head, and that would have been it.

Not this one, he didn't think.

He couldn't take her home, of course. That would have been absurd. Johnny had the parental instincts of a giant squid and was even more dangerous around children. His house would probably try to kill her, anyway. It was angry enough with just him there.

"I suppose I've got to figure out what to do with you now, right?" he asked her. She blinked at him, kicking her tiny feet against the bloodied pavement.

The sirens interrupted them again, closer now, and Johnny tore his eyes away from her for a second and could make out the dim flashing of red over the tops of a few burned-out, nearby apartment buildings. Cops would be here soon, maybe some had called 911-

He felt her grab his wrist in surprise, tightening her little fingers around the gloved leather. Unexpected human contact made his gag reflex jerk awake. It surprised him so badly that he nearly struck her.

He caught himself and sank his nails into her shoulder instead. Feeling the soft bones give. She squeaked unhappily, growing red-faced, almost in tears, her serious brown eyes beginning to shine. Shit. Shit goddamned it.

"Don't start that," he snapped. Crying children weren't something that he tolerated particularly well. Parents ought to keep tabs on their little brats in check, or at least keep them from getting upset in the first -

Oh, right.

"What's your name, anyway?" he said. Thank god she looked old enough to walk, because he would absolutely have left her here if she'd needed to be carried.

The little girl didn't answer him. She eyed the two bodies that were still only a few feet away, as if she hadn't heard the question.

"Hey!" He poked her in the side with his boot tip. "What's your name?"

Still no answer. Still no eye contact. In what looked like a totally unrelated action, she started fidgeting with something around her neck. Johnny hoped she wasn't trying to give him any ideas. He shoved her chubby fingers out of the way so he could see what she'd been playing with.

It was a beaded necklace. Nothing fancy - just made out of yarn and those blocky wooden beads they have at kindergartens - but something that looked like it had been handmade. In the middle of the string were a few lettered beads.

They spelled out "Gazlene."

"Is that your name? 'Gazlene'?" he asked her. She did not respond.

"Hey, you want me to leave you here? Gazlene? Gaz!" he tried, louder now, and at the sound of his voice she snapped her head toward him and her sticky hair flew around her face.

Apparently that was it. Shortened was better.

"Alright, Gaz. Keep up. I've got somewhere to take you," he said, yanking gently on the sleeve of her dress as he began walking down the street. For a few seconds she hesitated, still watching the bodies.

"Come on!" Johnny called. "Gaz!"

She tossed one last look over her shoulder and followed him, dashing up to his side as he walked away from the grisly scene, trailing bloody footprints behind her. Johnny rammed his hands down in his pockets so that she wouldn't be tempted to hold his hand, and they walked together into the darkness.

He hoped that his idea would work.

* * *

_Lyrics at the top courtesy of the song "Hey Montana," by Eve 6. Thought you were going to read a grown-up fic without song lyrics at the beginnings of chapters, didn't you? WELL TOO BAD, SUCKERS. I-I mean…please don't leave me!_

_Anyway, looks like the first chapter of many is a go. Reviews are encouraged and loved and fawned over, and I'll do my best to respond to all of them. So please leave one, if you're so inclined. If not, Chapter 2 will be up in a week or so, depending on interest, so stick around! Edgar Vargas will be making his appearance. _


	2. Give Us One More Try

**Chapter 2: Give Us One More Try**

_Let me out, don't tell me everything  
Start it out like any other day  
Must have gave the wrong impression  
Don't you understand where I belong?  
I'm not the one_

Edgar liked a glass of wine in the evenings when he read the paper. Sometimes two or three. He still enjoyed a good merlot even though all the experts said that it was a plebian variety. What did they know? He bought his black bottles at the Wall-to-Wallmart anyway and had only one badly-stained wineglass. It wasn't exactly a tasting room at the Ritz Carlton over here in his lonely little apartment.

Three glasses of wine on a weeknight wasn't the smartest, he knew. It certainly didn't make the city's badly-edited newspaper any easier to read. Sometimes his barren rooms just seemed a little quiet. Sometimes his thoughts just got a little still in the stagnant, empty air, and on those nights he filled his glass right up to the edge and read today's paper and yesterday's, too.

At least tonight he would have, if he could find the damned thing.

Edgar's apartment was embarrassingly bare, but that didn't mean he couldn't lose things in it. He'd realized on several occasions that if he should ever need to, he could gather up a handful of sentimental objects (the Bible he'd been given at Sunday school in third grade, his sister's photograph, his college diploma) and be gone within minutes. No one would ever know he'd lived there. He'd vanish into thin air.

Not that Edgar ever planned to do this, but the option was still there.

Right now he was wandering through the desolate spaces of his several rooms, half-full glass of wine in one hand as he tried to figure out where he'd left yesterday's paper. Edgar had no bigger pleasures in his life, no great satisfactions – no life goals or people to love or novels to write or cancers to cure – but he did have his wine and his newspaper and there were days when those tiny things felt as important as any loved one.

There were really only so many places it could be. He tended to peel pages off of it as he read; leaving the Sports section abandoned near the recycling bin, the Business section in the bathroom, Entertainment by his bedside table. For some reason he couldn't seem to find any of them.

All he wanted to do was take another look at the crossword puzzle. That would have been in "Local News," right? Where on earth had he sat while reading that?

Edgar skipped the second door in the hall as he looked for newspaper pages. No point in checking the guest room; he never went in there. The whole place was filled with musty blankets and old college textbooks and things that he'd never use but felt too weird to throw away.

He stomped angrily into the living room and planted the knuckles of his free hand on his hip, looking around for any sign of black-and-white paper. He took a sip of the merlot but found that that didn't help. Behind the couch, maybe? No. On the TV stand? No luck.

For a moment he gazed at the empty, peach-colored walls and thought vaguely that he really ought to get some art to hang up. That was one of those five-minute projects he'd never gotten around to.

Edgar took another sip of wine and continued his search.

He'd always thought that the whole point of being the organized and anal-retentive kind of guy who gets difficult if someone forgets to use a coaster was that you managed to avoid these little annoyances. Annoyances like lost newspapers. Sure, Edgar didn't have any friends, but he'd be damned if there were any water rings on his coffee table.

Amidst his grumbling, the doorbell rang. Edgar tilted his head and stared at the door for a moment or two, his thoughts still tangled up in the Case of the Disappearing Local New Section. Barring a complaining landlady or Chinese food, his doorbell almost never rang.

Okay, fine. It never rang. Not "almost never."

Whoever was on the other side of the door grew quickly frustrated and pounded the buzzer a few more times. The tinny ring echoed through the apartment and he heard glasses in the kitchen rattling against each other in resonation.

"I'm coming," he called out, though the door was thick and no one heard him. Felt better to have made the effort, anyway. Edgar passed by the kitchen on his way to the door and set his wine glass down on the counter.

The newspaper was lying, neatly stacked, on his kitchen table.

That was odd. Maybe he'd -

RING RING RING.

His visitor pounded on the door once after ringing the bell several more times. Some kind of emergency, it seemed like.

"Nearly there," Edgar said, still to himself, still a little mixed-up from the surprise of a visitor and the weirdness with the newspaper. So mixed-up that it didn't occur to him to check the peephole until he'd opened the door and saw a thin and black-garbed murderer standing on his welcome mat.

Johnny leered up at him, standing a few inches shorter than Edgar but a thousand times larger in presence alone. His unkempt, black and greasy hair was the same as Edgar remembered it. The glassy eyes that rarely focused, ringed in sleepless bruises, watched him distastefully.

Edgar managed not to yelp at the sight of Johnny showing up at his apartment. His brain gummed up and lurched and reorganized itself fifty times in screeching, deja-vu confusion. Was it really Johnny? Check, it was him. The mad-eyed, frightening man from the reeking dungeon. The one who philosophized and killed.

Of course Edgar remembered that handful of hours caged in steel, nearly torn in two. His memories were blurry and soft if he tried too hard to recall the whole incident. Details were easier. Sweat sticky between skin and metal. Trying to argue ethics with his chest constricted. Sometimes at night a flicker of the smell of blood or glare of a bloodshot hazel eye would wake him from a tenuous sleep.

The police had been no help. No one else to tell, really. Every day of mundane safety drove the memory down, quieted it, until the unease and sickness became specters. He'd almost liked it, in a way. Not being dead was Edgar's greatest accomplishment.

His bit of pride and security disintegrated at the sight of Johnny on his doorstep. It had all been real after all, then. Edgar felt some kind of creepy, jittering fear writhe about in his innards but managed to keep it still. Don't freak out.

The shock faded a touch and Edgar noticed that Johnny was holding a bundle tightly against his chest. Probably a weapon? Edgar kept his eyes locked on the object even as Johnny shook the disdainful expression from his face. Just like that, it was gone, reminding Edgar how he could shift moods without warning.

Instead, Johnny looked suddenly confused. When he finally spoke his words sounded stilted and uneven.

"Oh. Edgar. I, uh- I didn't really - expect to see you here?"

"Well, this is where I live. It's probably the place you're most likely to see me."

Edgar winced at his own sarcasm and half-expected to feel a piece of metal collide with his skull. Nothing came, fortunately. Just a twitching expression on Johnny's face and he adjusted his hold on the bundle.

"People usually live where they live, yes." Pause. "Your name wasn't in the phonebook."

"I had it taken out after…" Shit. He'd talked himself into a corner now. "After an unpleasant incident a few months back. Don't really want to talk about it."

Johnny stared at him, still confused. Not angry, or even frustrated. Just a crinkled frown of disorientation. Could he not remember? It seemed possible. Johnny might have been intelligent but the insanity had to dampen that at least a bit.

"Huh. Well, that's okay, I guess. You still weren't too hard to find. The receptionist at your office had plenty to say about you once I'd taken off her feet," he said, in a lighthearted tone that made Edgar want to cringe.

He'd liked Carla. Sometimes she'd ask him about his weekend and then he'd been embarrassed to have nothing to say.

Edgar shuddered and cleared his mind and moved the conversation on. Ending this conversation as quickly as possible was his goal.

"If you don't mind my asking, did you need something from me, Johnny?"

"Oh, right. Sorry. Got a bit distracted there. I need for you to take this."

Johnny held the bundle out in front of him, pressing it to Edgar's chest, making him take a panicked step backwards in case it was a bomb or hunk of rotting meat or something equally repulsive.

Instead, it was a child. Edgar was no less stunned.

He took the (mercifully sleeping) kid from Johnny, surprised by her weight. It had to be a girl, judging by the mess of half-curly purple hair held together in a little bow. Johnny had wrapped her in a dingy blanket that Edgar felt somewhat unsure about holding against him as he tried to keep her steady.

Johnny waiting impatiently in silence as Edgar looked her over, tapping his metallic foot against the ground.

"What- What is this?"

"Geez, Edgar, I gave you more credit than that. It's a child. A tinier, more disgusting version of a person. Well, I guess it depends where the source of your disgust is coming from, really. I have to say that that kid has managed not to insult me since I've had her. More than I can say for her full-grown counterparts, I suppose."

"But-" Edgar wasn't listening. His mind was trying to pick out a jumbled, half-formed thought to focus on.

Something horrible rocketed to the front of his mind. Edgar shifted the little girl to one arm and grabbed Johnny by the shoulder, feeling the bones beneath prod his hand.

"You didn't- you didn't kill this girl's mother, did you?" he asked.

Johnny shook his hand off, glaring darkly, looking angry for the first time. Edgar leaned backwards into the tenuous safety of his doorway.

"Don't touch me."

"I'm sorry. But answer me, please."

"No, I didn't. Would you believe it? Someone else beat me to it."

Edgar hitched in sickness and held the child closer to his chest. She wriggled in her sleep and he felt reassured by a living thing so near. "But why…? What do you want me to do?"

"Look after her."

"Why don't you look after her?" Edgar asked, instinctively, the words tumbling out of the stupidest and most inquisitive part of his brain.

"I don't care for things that need attention and physical contact to thrive. Affection has never been my area of expertise. The last time I had something to look after I ended up running a nail through it. Besides, you seemed like a nice guy that one time we met."

Edgar sensed from Johnny's tone that this was supposed to be an immense compliment. He somehow wasn't very touched.

"Wouldn't it be better to go to the police? Maybe she's got some family-"

"I don't think so. I really don't," Johnny said, shifting uneasily from foot to foot.

Edgar wanted badly to ask how he knew this but decided against it. Johnny didn't seem like he responded well to prying.

"Still. I'm not really equipped to look after a child," he said instead.

"Find someone who is, then." Johnny spoke through gritted teeth this time. "Stop making this such a goddamned ordeal. I'm just trying to get rid of this kid without killing her; that's the most you could fucking ask of me. Give Social Services a call for all I care, I'm sure they'll be more than happy to-"

"No! I'm not doing that!"

Edgar hadn't meant to yelp so loudly. He hadn't meant to clutch the warm-centered bundle close to his chest so suddenly. For a brief instant he was afraid that he'd woken her - no, she slept like death - and then for a much less brief instant, he was horrified that he'd just yelled at a serial killer.

He watched Johnny for any sign of a lunge or break.

The killer only blinked owlishly at him, lip curling back to reveal a few tightly-clenched canines. It was more a look of surprise than anger. Doing good, Edgar.

"I'm sorry," he said hastily. "It's just-it's just a bit sudden. I don't have any supplies or toys or anything like that."

Johnny shrugged, falling back into his normal hunched posture. "Just figure something out. It can't be that hard. Otherwise they would have implemented a pre-procreation exam or something."

"How could you force people to take a test before they were allowed to have children?"

"Fuck if I know. State-mandated sterilization. Don't act like it wouldn't be a good idea. I'm just saying it's fucked up that it takes two weeks to adopt a dog but any shithead can make a baby."

_Well, sure. Everything sounds awful when it's been filtered through Johnny's disturbed mind,_ Edgar thought but didn't say. This could quickly turn into an undoubtedly interesting but very drawn-out ranting session. Strange how the presence of a murderer could turn Edgar off of something he normally enjoyed.

"It is," Edgar said, agreeing for his own safety. He glanced down at the child again, making sure that she was still asleep. "Can you at least tell me what her name is?"

"Gazlene."

"Gasoline? I don't think that's a name, Johnny."

"Not 'gasoline.' I'm not a moron. Jesus. _Gazlene_. Might have the same linguistic root, I don't know."

"Huh. Well, that's – um – an interesting choice. Is it alright if I call her 'Gaz'?"

"Sure, whatever. I don't give a shit. I've already spent too much time on this whole debacle. It's out of my hands now," and Johnny waved a bony hand dismissively at the two of them, making Edgar jump at the careless motion.

At least Johnny seemed to want to leave as much as Edgar wanted him gone.

"Is there...is there anything else you'd like for me to know?" he tried.

"Don't eat yellow snow."

"Pfft," Edgar laughed involuntarily, not expecting that.

Johnny almost smiled - his eyes widened a bit and his mouth spasmed - and then he left them. He turned away and stalked back down the walkway toward the stairs, bearing his striped and skinny back. He was so thin that he seemed to shrink into the distance even though the walk was maybe fifteen yards long. Edgar watched him go. He wanted to make very sure that Johnny wouldn't turn back or change his mind before he withdrew back into his apartment and shut the door.

He spent longer than necessary fastening all the chain-locks and deadbolts, his fingers shaking badly as he went. Having Gaz nestled in the crook of his other arm forced him to be a little steadier.

Edgar let out a heavy sigh of relief once they were barricaded safely inside. The air moving around in his lungs was reassuring. Everyone was still alive, no carnage, no ripping-apart machines. That could have gone a lot worse. He slammed his back against the door and slid slowly to the ground, settling Gaz into his lap.

One of her eyes slid open. She looked him over with a very judgmental expression for a so young a child. Perhaps she was wondering where her murderous caretaker had gone and was unimpressed with his replacement.

"You know," Edgar said to her, as she glared blearily up at him, "Both of us are very lucky."

/\\/\\/\\/\\/\\

Edgar took her. What choice did he have? Johnny knew where he lived now; if the madman returned someday, foaming at the mouth in a fit of insanity, and Edgar had given the child away…well, the outcome would indisputably unpleasant. Johnny must have had at least some attachment to Gaz to bother bringing her to Edgar rather than leaving her in a gutter somewhere. And even if hadn't, he still might slice-and-dice Edgar in the throes of a tantrum for daring to turn down his gift of an orphaned child.

Well, all that, _plus_ he was a good and honest person, wasn't he? And the last thing the world needed was another child added to the dead-eyed foster care system. Edgar thought of all the underfed kids shuffled between disinterested, baby-shaking mothers and cringed. He could do better, he thought, as he settled Gaz down to sleep in the musty-sheeted bed of his guest room.

He took a week off of work. "Family emergency," he told his boss over the phone, who only grunted and muttered something about getting Ian to edit the articles for the Mackenson account instead.

"No problem. We'll work something out. Can't pay you, though. Hope you feel better," his boss had said before hanging up, even though Edgar hadn't said anything to him about being ill.

It took four trips to the store a few pinned-together tee-shirt dresses before he was confident in his child-care supplies. Edgar had been to the grocery store and seen crying children so many times that he'd started to assume that something about the muzak and cart-seats sent kids into automatic paroxysms of sobbing, but he found out with Gaz that that was not the case.

She was nerve-wrackingly quiet. Occasionally he'd get a point and a yelp out of her, when he passed by an aisle of cookies, or a twisted expression of disgust when something annoyed her, but never any words.

He spent the first few days trying to get her to talk to him. It was a certainty to him that Gaz _could_ speak. When he asked if she wanted some ice cream, her hazel eyes widened and she nodded her head excitedly and made a mad dash for the kitchen. When he announced that it was bedtime (often far too late) she scrunched up her face in anger and huffed dramatically and he somehow always got the feeling that she was giving him the cold shoulder even though she'd never spoken to him to begin with.

Gaz was clever. She could hear and understand him. She squeaked and yelped and cried, so surely she could speak. She just refused.

This was the tragedy of Edgar Vargas. He'd spent a vast majority of his life alone, speaking only to himself, learning to wall himself contentedly into his solitude like a bear in winter, and when another conversationalist finally came along -

She chose to be mute.

That was life, he supposed. So it went.

Her silence continued even at his apartment. Their evenings were quiet - only marginally less so than when Edgar had been alone - but he found that this little ghost of a creature managed to keep him occupied.

A night came when Edgar needed to make up at least a few things for work. He'd be totally swamped by the time he made it back otherwise. He'd set up a makeshift work area at the far end of the kitchen table so that he could watch Gaz totter around the living room as he worked. Gaz was certainly too clever to eat a Lego or stick her fingers in a light socket but Edgar was too neurotic to ever really stop worrying about the possibility of either.

On one side of him was a massive pile of articles to be edited and he had four or five different pens beside him as he went through them. Spelling mistakes were pointed out in red, grammar mistakes in blue, factual errors in green...he only used black ink for indicating whole swathes of unforgivable text that needed to be wiped out.

Edgar slammed the first article down in front of him and groaned at the title alone.

"'Meta-analysis of Traffic Cone Angles of Inversion: Part 1 of 6,'" he read aloud.

After selecting his blue pen, Edgar set to work reading the abomination of writing. He only made it a paragraph in before finding something so dreadful it needed to be commented on.

"This sentence is absurd. 'After gathering of exampled, our intern confirmed existence of leaded paints in street lapels.' I swear, what are people _thinking_ when they write this stuff? Doesn't anyone proofread? Might as well be in Greek," he said, half to Gaz and half to no-one as he started making angry notes in the margins of the article.

He saw her look up at him briefly from her Lego castle before returning to her game.

A few pages later: "This guy's started every sentence with a preposition for the past _paragraph_! It's like he's writing with a verbal tic. I don't even know what he's saying anymore, I'm just seeing a whole page of 'fors.'"

His pen scratched loudly against the paper as Gaz ignored him. She'd sorted all of her Lego people into one pile and was marching them into the castle. For a second or two he thought about turning on the TV just to break the silence, but he doubted that he'd be able to read as "Sesame Street" discussed the finer points of lowercase ''J" in the living room.

Edgar continued to edit. The article had hardly any transitional sentences and he pointed these out with angry comments written in purple gel pen.

"Better add 'schizophrenia' to 'verbal tic' on the list of this guy's problems," Edgar said, still eliciting no response from Gaz.

Edgar hadn't exactly dreamed of being an editor as a child, and he wondered sometimes if all the constant critiquing of other people's work was making him a little bitter. It never felt natural to him.

A break seemed imminent. He set his pen down, planted his elbows on the table and covered his face in his hands and took a deep breath. This was going to be a long night on top of a longer week. It occurred to him that he hadn't even planned far enough ahead to know who was going to watch Gaz when he had to return to work. Shit. Was there a daycare between here and the office? Didn't people usually spend weeks finding appropriate babysitters for their children instead of dropping them off randomly at the first place with cartoon characters drawn on the sign? Was he already such a bad caretaker?

He couldn't even get her to talk to him, for Christ's sake.

Edgar got to his feet and started digging around one of the dish cabinets. He reached compulsively for his wineglass but then thought better of it and instead chose a child-friendly plastic cup with opaque sides out of something like guilt.

That was stupid of him, he realized. Gaz would probably just think he was drinking grape juice, if she noticed anything at all (which was doubtful). He walked over to the refrigerator and fetched a stoppered-up bottle of wine from a few days ago. It'd still be good, he thought. Maybe make the editing go faster. Maybe make the apartment louder.

Edgar carried his bottle and his cup over to the table and started arranging them for combination like an alchemist. When he looked up from what he was doing, he noticed that Gaz had snuck into the kitchen. Quiet little sucker, she was. He watched her trying to lever herself up onto his chair at the table for a few minutes before setting down his things and going over to help her.

"Did you want a snack?" he asked, scooting her up into the chair.

She eyed his bottle and shook her head very quickly. And then, before he could stop her, she'd grabbed his purple gel pen and flipped the top page of the shitty essay over and started drawing on the blank side.

"Gaz, I was using that - " he started, and then decided that whatever she doodled on it had to be better quality than the writing on the other side.

The pen scraped against the page for a while. Gaz was holding it much tighter than she needed to - her little knuckles shone white and purple ink dumped out over the paper as she ringed circles and scribbled in color. As she drew she leaned in very close over the table, purple hair falling down over her face and brushing the paper. Laser-beam focus.

Edgar watched her and made a mental note to buy some paints when he went to the store again. Creativity had never been his forte - he read and corrected, but never wrote - and so of course it had completely slipped his mind that most kids liked to make things.

And then, in a bit of a sweeping motion, Gaz stabbed her pen down and made the final finishing dot to her drawing. She held it up in front of her, gave a tiny frowning nod, and handed the picture to Edgar.

"Oh, wow. This is really something," he said awkwardly. There was definitely a pattern to the circles and scribbles and dots but Edgar would be damned if he could find it. He felt the sinking sting of being a bad parent and a bad art critic both. "Uhm...and what do you call it?"

He sort of hoped he could trick her into speaking. Instead she scrunched up her face at him, clearly angry at his ignorance. He could have sworn he heard her actually snort in frustration.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Really, though?"

She narrowed her eyes at him and made a single sound: "Oink."

Not the onomatopoeia - the actual snorting-grunting farm-animal noise.

"Ah, a pig. Okay, I think I see it now. Those are the ears, right?" he asked, waving at some pointy bits near the top of the drawing.

Gaz didn't nod, but the look she gave him said clearly: _Yes, you moron_.

"Very nice." And Edgar remembered after school specials and perfect sitcom families and thought of something. "Would you let me put it on the fridge?"

Her head tilted to one side slowly.

"I need some art around here, anyway. You can help if you want."

She took his hand and they shuffled over to the refrigerator together, Edgar holding the drawing with all the reverence he would show a religious artifact. No one had ever drawn anything for him before. It wasn't words, exactly, but it was something, especially coming from so surly a child.

Gaz arranged a handful of Chinese takeout and bottle opener magnets around her picture on the fridge, and the two of them took a second to admire their handiwork.

Once the ceremonial hanging was finished, Edgar put his bottle back into the fridge.

* * *

_Song at the top is from the Killer's "Carry Me Home," one of my favorite personal choices for an Edgar song. The title comes from Boxcar Racer's "The End With You," which was a competing choice for this chapter. _

_"What's Edgar doing here?!" you're wondering. "He's supposed to be DEAD!" you say, with the exact same inflection as Yzma from "The Emperor's New Groove." Well, don't worry, Chicklets. I know he's supposed to be dead. And there will be an explanation for this whole not-dead fiasco sooner or later. (Okay, it will be later. But it's out there, I promise.)_

_I've always like the idea of Edgar as an editor for an article-processing firm. Mostly because a good buddy of mine does the same job and has a very Edgar-ness about him. I did a lot of editing in undergrad myself, and it's really redundant work that still requires a lot of attention to detail. I dunno, giving the job to Edgar just struck me as kind of funny. _

_Anyway anyway. Thanks for reading, beautiful people. Don't hesitate to leave a review! I love all of them very much, and even the tiniest one will brighten my day. Otherwise, I'll see you when the next chapter goes live!_


	3. Tiny Voices

_Little prewarning: there's some violence in this chapter. I'm sure it's nothing you can't handle if you've read JtHM in all its uncensored glory, but it still seems like good form to let you know what's coming in case you get queasy._

* * *

**Chapter 3: Tiny Voices**

_"I think this place is full of spies  
I think they're onto me  
Didn't anybody tell you  
Didn't anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room?  
And so now I'm sorry I missed you  
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain  
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way"_

_"You should have killed her."_

Johnny hitched up the corner of his mouth into a snarl as he heard the voice speak. It didn't sound like the Rev. Meat, but so many entities came and went in his mind that sometimes it was hard to tell. He chose to ignore this one.

He turned his focus to the rude postman who'd been stapled by his uniform to the floor of one of his many basement rooms. Fewer now, since the incident, but Johnny still had quite enough space to work with. He was no longer obligated to find blood for the wall, no longer forced to meet a corpse quota since his Waste-lock status had been stripped from him, but that didn't mean there weren't still assholes out there that could stand to be culled from the population. One such asshole was here in the room with him, in fact.

"This is really just an accident. A misunderstanding! I promise. You let me go, and I can get you all the free stamps you want!" the postman was wailing, the whites of his eyes visible as he watched Johnny stalking around him.

Johnny tapped the blunt back of a cleaver against his palm, matching each strike with his footsteps. He was clearing a very tight circle. "An accident? Are you even listening to yourself?"

"Yes!" The man yanked fruitlessly at one of his restrained arms. "I had nothing to do with your mailbox! Honest!"

"I FUCKING HATE CABBAGE!" Johnny roared, suddenly, bracing his feet far apart and clenching his fists at his sides. "YOU KNEW IT, DIDN'T YOU?! THOUGHT IT'D BE FUNNY, HUH?! FILL UP THE WIERDO'S MAILBOX WITH COLESLAW! YOU _FUCKER_!"

And with the final word he heaved the point of his boot right into the postman's side, driving a few loose staples deeper. Even amidst the victim's shrieking, Johnny could still hear the disembodied voice rattling around his head, never silenced.

"_You're ignoring me because you know I'm right. That's very rude,"_ it said.

"I don't know anything," Johnny shot back, hoping that his curtness would shut them up. His own voice echoed lamely around the little room. The only sound that answered him was the whimpering sack of organs on the floor. Good.

He shook his head, trying to re-focus. "What were we talking about? Right. You filled my mailbox with coleslaw."

"I didn't!" the postman sobbed, making an effort to curl against his restraints like a maggot. "I swear! I don't even work this route!"

"You must have, because I recognize you. I might be hideously insane, but I remember everyone who wrongs me. _Everyone_."

"Well, your aim must be getting fuzzy, because I never -"

"SHUT UP! STOP LYING!" Johnny snarled, and in sudden spastic fit he hurled his knife at the ground. It shot through the air and sliced the postman's ear clean off of his head. Good shot. Lots of blood. He hadn't even been aiming.

The handle of the knife quivered where it had stopped, rammed halfway down into the floorboards beside the postman's screaming head. No words, just screaming, screaming, white teeth bared like an animal's.

Johnny was deeply reluctant as he stepped carefully over to the man's side and started yanking his blade out of the ground. It would have been a pain to go all the way back to the surface looking for another. His fingers slipped in the blood and he felt the reverberations of the man's yelling, but he was finally able to wrench it back out.

_"Whiner,"_ one of the voices said. Johnny caught himself nodding in agreement as he polished the too-early blood off the knife, and then grimaced at his own misstep.

"You stay out of this," he muttered.

"Who are you-who are you talking to?" the man on the floor moaned, between breathless panting. He'd shut his eyes very tightly.

"No one."

"Eh? I can't hear you!"

"Oh, for the love of -" Johnny wished he'd gone the power-tool route this time, instead of the archaic knives-and-nails way of dismembering people. Here he was obligated to make conversation because of the lack of roaring machinery. "Look, Mister Postman, I'm really not the one we should be focusing on here. You're the one who fucked up my mailbox with pukeslaw to satisfy your own primal asshole instincts. "

"I never did a damned thing to you! I swear on my dead mother's corpse. I always delivered your medical supply catalog right on time!"

Johnny wheeled slowly on his captive, eyes aching with how wide he'd opened them. "You what?"

The postman nailed to the floor had already lost a good deal of blood to his missing ear, but the color still somehow managed to drain from his face. Maybe it all went out his earhole, who knew. But Johnny saw that wide-eyed twitchy expression and that tightening of every muscle and knew it as the face of someone who's just realized how utterly and royal screwed they are.

"I thought -" Johnny said softly, thumbing the edge of his knife "That my house wasn't even on your route?"

"Euuggghhh," the man choked out.

"I see. A proven liar and an asshole. It was a good attempt, trying to get me to question myself. It would have worked better if I didn't _already_ doubt my own sanity most of the time, though."

Kneeling by the man's side, Johnny avoided the ear-blood seeping into a neatly-edged puddle on the floor. He folded his boots beneath him and only halfway watched the postman's bloodshot eyes staring at his knife, waiting for it to fall or stab.

"You skinny little fuck," the man hissed, fear twisting into rage, "What was I supposed to do? Loser like you was asking for it. Asking for it like a naked chick at a feminist rally. I wish I'd filled your damned mailbox with sewage instead."

"I'd have preferred that, honestly," Johnny said, through clenched and aching teeth, the knife shaking in his hand as he thought about which artery to aim for. He was getting worked up now. The bloodlust was foaming inside of him, rising like the tide. Contrary to what he'd seen on any number of horror movies, killing people didn't really give him a _high_ or any other such perversion. Johnny was above that. It was more of a frenzied relief. One less asshole to hurt him. One less screaming voice in his house.

Like stabbing yourself in the eye with a stick - it felt so good when it finally _stopped_.

Speaking of stabbing.

Johnny reared his knife back and locked his wrist. Right through he eye, he was thinking, into the frontal lobe. That was the center of sophisticated thought, emotion and sympathy, if he wasn't mistaken. Seemed appropriate to take that out.

The postman shut his eyes very tightly, his disgusting breath coming in choking gasps. Soon it would be over, blood everywhere, Johnny quietly jealous of the freedom from this hellish mortal coil as he brought the knife down and -

_"Johnny! Will you stop with your childish revenge games and listen to me for one bloody second?!" _

His fist veered off at the last second and the knife rammed into a nail in the floor, chipping of the very tip of the metal. God-fucking-damnit.

"I'm sort of in the middle of something right now," Johnny said, nearly growling in his frustration at being interrupted. The voice had ruined the moment. "Please leave a message and call back later."

_"Look, if I was always waiting for you to be done murdering people, then I'd never get a word in edgewise. This is important."_

"Maybe to you."

The postman's eyes had snapped open by now, and he was looking up at Johnny with some kind of obscene awe smeared over his expression. His bottom lip quivered.

"That-that's right...put the knife down...c'mon, I didn't mean to call you a loser, we can just -"

"Shut up, asswipe. It's always stupid to get your hopes up. I'll kill you here in a minute; I've just got to talk to the voices first," Johnny said, using his captive's restrained body as a lever as he got to his feet.

_"Are you going to listen to me for once?"_

"That depends. What have you got to tell me that's so important?"

The house creaked quietly at him, mockingly, before he heard one of the voices answer. They always liked to do that. Forced him to wait in silence. Make him doubt if he'd heard a voice at all.

Johnny waited.

_"You remember that little girl from the other night? On the street? With the eyes?"_

"Yeah. I'm not that deluded yet. What about her?"

_"You should have killed her. I never thought I'd be saying that, but you really should have. That was a fuckup on your part, Johnny. It was cute watching you try to be a decent person, but you and I both know that you're an irredeemable piece of shit and that moment of weakness is going to cost you big time."_

He winced at the insult. Even his own voices hated him, and that made for quite the dysfunctional living situation. "What the fuck difference does it make to you who I kill or don't? I just got done taking orders from that - from that fucking _wall_. I'm not going to just take your spooky word for it."

"I-I care who you kill or don't," the postman said meekly from the floor, but Johnny waved him silent with the bloody-edged knife.

_"I have nothing to do with the wall, Johnny. The wall is good and dead. This isn't about maintaining control or bloodying a wall or anything like that. There aren't any ulterior motives here. We're trying to keep you safe, you moron."_

"You're just like Mister Fuck, then."

_"STOP INTERUPTING!"_ The voice rasped in frustration as its false-cool tone failed it. Johnny felt a bit proud about pissing it off. _"This is all very, very simple. You need to kill that little girl. Very bad things are going to happen now that she's been allowed to live. Especially since you went and dumped her off on that weirdo with the goatee."_

"Edgar's got her."

_"Right, that's it. Better kill him again while you're at it."_

"No."

_"Why not? Might as well try; your first go clearly wasn't thorough enough._

"Because I'm not going to kill people or not kill people just because you tell me to! 'Very bad things,'" And Johnny snorted derisively, "I'm an expert at very bad things. Whatever you are, I don't need or want your undoubtedly two-faced 'advice.'"

The voice fell silent. Johnny thumbed at the edge of his knife, waiting for it to speak again, because it was very, very rare for any of his voices to back down into silence. Behind him the nailed-down postman panted frantically. He only had a few more minutes to breathe - Johnny doubted very much that he was enjoying it.

And then, finally, Johnny heard it whisper inside his head: _"You stupid, stubborn boy. I'm trying to help you. The two of you will destroy each other. D'you realize that?"_

"Bring it on, then," Johnny growled, turning back to his captive. This conversation was wearing on him. This vague and insulting voice was wearing on him.

_"Fine, you skeeving lonely fuckup. When the shit hits the fan, don't say I didn't warn you. You deserve whatever you get for being stupid enough to ignore my good-will warning."_

"Don't talk to me like that!"

Suddenly he was angry, really angry, fingers wrapped white-knuckled around his knife and his body shaking because he needed to hit something. That stupid voice wasn't physical and he couldn't hurt it and that made him angrier still that there were voices that violence couldn't silence. Nothing he could do, really.

Just clench his jaw and snarl like an animal and in a twisting-and-pouncing motion, Johnny whirled and rammed his knife straight down into the postman's eye socket. He moved too fast for his victim to scream, his face frozen in slack-jawed surprised as blood sprayed from the wound. Warm and sticky droplets splattered onto Johnny's face.

Johnny stared down at the broken figure. Blood spurted out into a sticky puddle on the ground, slick and shiny like latex. The man's face had been rearranged into something very grotesque by the knife that had bisected it. On another day Johnny might have thought it symbolic, artistic even, but right now he saw only the gutted sickness of a dead animal.

He felt his rage begin to subside and the world slide back into focus. The sound of his heartbeat thundered in his ears, limbs shaking, his hair down in his eyes and sweat-tipped. So many goddamned _feelings_. He waited in the silence and the blood. The air felt thick with copper.

When he finally spoke, his mouth felt dry.

"That wasn't mine. I didn't' get to do that," he hissed.

_"Of course you did, Nny. I don't even have any hands. How could I have done it?"_

Johnny hated that this voice called him "Nny." He hadn't given it permission. "You know what I mean! I didn't decide to do it! You provoked me into it!"

_"Well, I can't possibly see what difference that makes. He's still quite dead."_

"It's a big fucking difference!" Johnny shrieked at the ceiling, his joints aching with how tightly he'd wound himself up. "This isn't supposed to happen anymore! I'm supposed to be FREE, goddamned it!"

_"I can't imagine why you'd want to be free when you clearly make such a fucking mess of it." _

Johnny heaved himself to his feet. He turned his back on the ruined postman, the tenuous outlet for his badly-managed emotions, and stormed toward the door. Out. Away. This sticky underground darkness was gnawing at him.

_"Where do you think you're going?"_ the voice asked, just as close now as he climbed the stairs toward the surface as it had been in the room below. Always so close.

"I'm leaving for a bit. Sick of your bullshit. It's none of your business." And in all honesty, it wasn't. The voices were always much, much quieter outside of the house. Something about this place focused and strengthened them, even after the wall was dead.

Some days Johnny thought about leaving again. About going on another Vision Quest, or whatever his several months of wandering had been. He always ended up back at this filthy shack, somehow or another. Johnny came home to roost at the only place disturbed enough to hold him.

Right now it couldn't. This very instant he felt the walls buckle as he walked beneath his emotional weight. He had to get out. Johnny breeched the final door out of the basement and breathed in the woody half-stale must of his first-floor rooms.

_"I hope you're not- you're not seriously thinking what I think you're thinking, are you?"_ the voice asked. It sounded a little quieter up here, he thought.

"I dunno. You tell me. You're the one fucking around in my head all the time," Johnny spat, pulling on his coat in the dark. It was night out - he had no idea how late - and wasn't too keen on turning on a bunch of lamps just to grab his jacket and keys. It'd burn his damned retinas out.

_"It's a bad idea, Nny. This thing you're planning on doing. It's a really goddamned bad idea and you should think real hard before you -"_

"I would hate -" Johnny said, twirling his keys on one finger, "to disappoint you, but I'm afraid I'm going to do exactly that. Goodnight and go fuck yourself, whatever you are."

And with the voice screeching vainly in his mind, shrinking away into his brain like a fading dream, Johnny walked out into the moonlit night and to his car.

* * *

_Lyrics at the top belong to the National, from their song "Secret Meeting." They're a spectacular band who I feel like I draw a lot of creative inspiration from. I'm not proud of how short this chapter is, but I've found I can't stay in Johnny's head too long. It's very loud. However, I'm hoping some of the plot baseboards are starting to establish themselves, so maybe things are gradually becoming more interesting. If nothing else ya'll got some good old-fashioned murder, and that's always good for a watch. _

_Anyway, please review, if the mood so strikes you! I would love to know how I'm doing during these build-up chapters. If nothing else I just love knowing that people out there are reading :) _


	4. An Encounter

**Chapter 4: An Encounter**

_"Nobody likes you when you're twenty-three  
And still amused by prank phone calls  
What the hell is Caller ID?  
You still act like you're in freshman year.  
What the hell is wrong with me?  
My friends say I should act my age –  
What's my age again?"_

By the time Johnny made it to Edgar's apartment complex, he'd figured out that it was late. All of the stores on the way there were dark - even the 24/7 that always had Demon Ham Brainfreezies - and the traffic lights all glowed in monotone yellow. It was so late that Johnny thought it might almost be early.

Time tended to hover and run together and stagnate and dash in the basements of his house. He could spend days down there with his corpses-to-be and never know it until he came up for air and the bread on the counter was molded.

That, combined with his totally fucked circadian rhythm, made it difficult for Johnny to estimate the time of day on a whim.

Right now he wasn't even sure if it was late or early, and the loss of that tiny certainty was a source of discomfort to him.

Johnny stalked up to the second-floor apartments and spent some time staring at the door of 2D, eyeing the accusatory peephole in the center of the solid-panel steel. Metal doors seemed odd - this wasn't in a terrible part of town.

Then again, neither was his shack, and it sure as hell wasn't safe over _there_.

Either way, Johnny's neuroses didn't feel like knocking. People got so bent out of shape when you showed up at their homes at odd hours. All the screaming and begging for mercy - it ached his head. Instead Johnny whipped out one of his thinner knives and had the lock jiggered open in ten seconds flat.

He shut the door very quietly behind him and walked through the early-morning gloom of Edgar's front few rooms. Hazy city-light leaked through the window above the kitchen sink and sparkled on a collection of dirty sippy cups gathered there. One of the cabinet doors hung open to reveal rows of coffee and Cheerios nestled together on a shelf. Johnny dodged around the door as he passed through, neglecting to close it.

The living room was a minefield of little plastic toys and boardbooks that made Johnny very glad indeed that he was wearing boots. Once or twice he'd stomped on a free-floating knuckle bone while walking barefoot at home, and those mothers _hurt_. He doubted that a spikey plastic dinosaur would feel much better.

Johnny made it to the couch safely. He managed to pick up a discarded copy of "The Giving Tree" on the way there after plucking it out from under a few dueling Triceratops. Something to pass the time. Johnny's thoughts were already becoming a little fuzzy on the exact reason he'd come here.

Something creaked down the hall. Johnny snapped his head up from the book, fingers crinkling paper, as he looked for the source of the sound. The nightlight glimmering a few doors down made his job easier - it cast a soft pink glow on the little girl who tottered out into the hallway from a darkened bedroom. Her pajamas were covered in cartoon pigs.

Johnny watched her silently wander over to where he'd set up camp on the sofa. The sight of a foreboding murderer reading her books in the dark apparently didn't make her too nervous. If anything she tossed him an incredulous "you-woke-me-up" sort of look before leaning up on her tiptoes to see what he was reading.

"I never liked this book much," Johnny said, letting her see the pictures. "I mean, what, this tree does everything it can for this shiftless kid and he never takes any shit for being such a mooch? If the tree was a woman this'd have 'abusive relationship' written all over it."

Gaz took the book away from him without saying anything and closed it.

"Of course, then I guess it would be kind of weird that he _eats part of her_. And rides her corpse around in the water. For some people, maybe. I've never really found corpses to be particularly buoyant."

Gaz wrinkled her nose as she set the book down on the ground and picked up a stuffed squeaky toy. She arranged a few of the plastic dinosaurs in an attack formation as she went.

"Oh, right. You're still doing that 'not talking' thing. That's okay. Most people talk too much as it is. All filler words. Worse than gibberish. They say nothing at each other all day and call it conversation. I don't mind a little silence," and Johnny nodded knowingly at her.

Speaking of silence. Johnny leaned forward on the couch a bit, leering back into the hallway at one of the other doors. They were all shut except for Gaz's - Edgar must still be asleep.

Satisfied with the arrangement of her toys, and paying hardly any mind to Johnny's rambling words, Gaz got back to her chubby feet and wandered off toward the kitchen. Good idea. Johnny admired this kid's thinking. He could go for a little snack himself, come to think.

He followed her into the kitchen and began rummaging through cabinets. Nothing too remarkable here - cans of soup, boxes of cereal, crackers - Johnny set everything that he found on the counter as he went. Gaz was digging through the lower shelves as well, though she seemed mostly interested in banging pots and pans around.

What Johnny really wanted was some cherries. Not Cherry Drank or Cherry Freezy or Cherry Poop Cola. Actual for real cherries. Some cherries would really be ideal. Maybe cherries in pancakes. It was morning, after all. Cherry pancakes. Would they be red?

"Do you think cherry pancakes would be red?" he asked Gaz. She looked over at him from where she was trying to reach a box of Cheerios he'd set on the cabinet. Her only answer was a one-shouldered shrug.

"I bet that they'd be red. Shit, now that's all I can think about. I'm gonna-I'm gonna go get some pancakes."

His mind shifted gear completely, and just when he had his hand on the front door, intending to leave after only a half-hour here, he felt something yank at the back of his pant leg. A nervous panic swept through him, thoughts all jumbled, as he twisted around to see the attacker and saw -

Gaz had grabbed onto his pants with one tiny fist. She was glaring up at him.

"What the fuck do you want?!" Johnny yelped, his tone split between anger and surprise.

Rather than falter, she yanked insistently at the hem of his pants. He felt them shift a bit around his waist. With her other hand she pointed at the door.

"Oh," he said softly. She wanted to come. Was that – was that alright? Could he tolerate that? Johnny paused to think, amidst other concerns about consumerism and cartoons and carcinogens, before finally shrugging.

"I guess…I mean…if you wanted."

Gaz did. She nodded once, and went to fetch something from the living room.

He tapped his foot irritably against the floor while he waited for her to return. No, he hadn't been hungry an hour ago, but something about the early morning tended to dredge up hunger in all human beings, regardless of their sleep schedule or distaste for satisfying biological urges. Now pancakes really _were_ all he could think about.

Gaz popped around the corner with a stuffed giraffe rammed up under her arm - she had a regular strangle-grip on the thing. If she wasn't careful its head might pop clean off. Johnny could use someone with a grip lie that, help hold down the wrigglier victims when they got kind of slippery in their blood and sweat down in his basement.

Eh, little girls probably weren't great murder partners. Pancake partners, sure. But disemboweling didn't come naturally to many of them. Johnny wondered if it even should. Then again, Gaz seemed pretty fearless, and -

She'd snuck up to his side while he pondered. The stuffed giraffe shifted as she got a better grip on it and then she held up her free hand for him. Johnny stared at it. Edgar must have gotten her on this whole hand-holding thing, he thought. He seemed like the type. Johnny was not.

"No, thanks," he said to her hand. Gaz looked at him strangely, as if she weren't used to being rejected for things, and then slowly withdrew her arm back down to her side. She hugged her giraffe a little more tightly.

"C'mon. Cherry pancakes. Yes or no?" he asked.

Without looking at him, she nodded one more time.

"That's what I thought."

They walked out of the apartment and down to the sidewalk together. It was getting to be morning proper now, with a healthy orange glow hovering down below the horizon line. Or at least, what Johnny could make out of the horizon line through the occasional inch-wide gaps between apartment buildings and convenience stores. Gaz's tiny feet had to really dash to keep up with his much longer strides - as they walked Johnny was constantly subjected to the _tap-tap-tap_ of her footsteps.

At every corner he kept expecting her to want to be picked up. Didn't kids usually like that shit? He hoped he'd dissuaded her a bit from that sort of thing. Maybe Edgar carried her around all day but Johnny wasn't too keen on the idea of having a child attached to him like a parasite.

The only reason he'd let her come at all was because somewhere, in the more spiteful part of his mind, he was determined to prove that those goddamned voices didn't have any sway on him. Johnny was like a teenager in at least a few respects, and being told he couldn't or shouldn't do something was a surefire way to see that it got done.

So if the bloody voices said that he should stay away from this innocuous little girl, then _fuck them_, that was exactly what he was going to do. Besides, he didn't find her company that repellant. Compared to a majority of the species, anyway. She didn't talk or bitch or insult him. Few and far between were the breathing organisms who Johnny could tolerate for more than thirty seconds at a time, so he saw few reasons to reject the company of this one.

Also pancakes.

Anyway. Gaz did mostly alright walking along without his help - occasionally she'd falter on her baby legs and he'd moodily wait for her to pull herself back together and keep walking. At least she didn't cry when she fell. He thought that that would have been very annoying.

The diner that Johnny had in mind was only a few blocks down ("Dezzie's 24-Hour Foodery") and Gaz followed him inside without comment or hesitation. Someone needed to talk to the kid about going with strangers. Johnny winced at the annoying _ding_ as the door swung shut behind him and got them a table as fast as possible.

He sat with his back to the wall and facing the door. It was inconceivable to sit any other way and his skin itched at the idea. People snuck up behind you otherwise. This was the only way he could keep an eye on the new customers as they came in. Not that there was much need for it, this time of day - a few groggy-looking waitresses hovered around even fewer patrons, serving almost exclusively coffee. Here and there Johnny caught sight of a piece of toast or two escaping the kitchen.

But mostly it was coffee. Johnny wrinkled his nose and thought fleetingly about leaving. He didn't like coffee. Hated it. Caffeine was one thing - it was spectacular and mind-clearing and kept him up on the scariest nights - and he'd certainly drank his weight in it several times over in the form of Mountain Dooms and Brainfreezies. But coffee was bitter. _Gross_.

Johnny glared at the other customers with their coffee as Gaz clambered up into the booth across from him. She fussily arranged her stuffed giraffe beside her until it was propped up and staring at him.

"I don't like that thing," Johnny said, eyeing it. The stern-faced little girl who should be dead didn't offend him too much, but that off-orange stuffy sure did. It reminded him of Squee's judgmental little bear. Those cold button eyes watched him unblinkingly.

Gaz flicked her gaze down to the stuffed toy, then back to Johnny, and gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Too bad," she seemed to say.

A waitress finally noticed them and bustled over, nearly sloshing coffee over them both. The nametag on her uniform read "Flo." Flo raised her eyebrows at them so high that they nearly disappeared into her overdone platinum-blonde hair. Her gaze flicked back and forth between the grumpy kid in her pajamas and Johnny himself in all his black-booted mangy glory as if she couldn't decide who would be less frightening to speak to first.

Flo must have been stupid, too, because she picked Johnny.

"Good morning. Aren't you two an odd couple?"

"Why do you say that?" Johnny asked, snapping his neck to look at her and narrowing his eyes. He could have sworn that Gaz was giving her a similar dirty look, but it was hard to tell since she always looked half-annoyed.

"Oh, no. Not like _that_. Just that it's...unusual to see kids her age up this early, and -" she tried.

"I want cherry pancakes," Johnny cut in.

The waitress stared at him.

"I don't think we serve those here," she said, half glancing-back at the chef behind the little window at the diner's bar, as if she expected him to come out and save her from the table of freaks.

"How can you not serve them?"

"Cherry pancakes aren't a thing."

"Just cut up some cherries and put them in the batter! It can't be rocket surgery," Johnny said, shooting the woman a glance that dared him to laugh at his misspeaking.

"Kid, I'm glad you saved me the trouble of passing out these menus-" she waved a plastic-wrapped pamphlet emphatically in the air, "but I can't have Big Joe making every half-baked special order that comes through that door. Weird couple or not."

"JESUS, WOMAN. I JUST WANT SOME FUCKING CHERRY PANCAKES. I'LL FUCKING PAY YOU FOR THEM AND EVERYTHING!" Johnny roared, his thin temper snapping. Who did this woman think she was, Pancake Interpol? It made him sick, the way that people obeyed arbitrary laws set down by no one a thousand generations back. He even heaved out his wallet and smashed it down into the middle of the table for effect.

He wished it was his knife. All the patrons were staring now, twisting on their bar chairs, watery eyes staring him down as if they all knew something that he didn't. The air felt tight and Johnny wondered how fast he'd have to be to find a fork to dig someone's eyes out with.

Little Gaz laughed at his outburst. He snapped his gaze over to her and she was looking at him with the faintest grin on her face. She didn't smile much but it was still somehow the slightest bit cute. It had been a "that-was-a-funny-joke" kind of laugh, not a "you're-a-freak" kind of laugh. Johnny appreciated the difference.

When he turned back to the waitress, she was still staring at the two of them, her pen hovering unproductively over a tiny notepad and her mouth hanging open. She swallowed thickly and finally spoke.

"So...an order of cherry pancakes for you, then?"

"Yes, thank you," Johnny said.

Flo avoided his eyes and took a few notes for much longer than could have possibly been necessary. "And what about the kid?"

"Uh...I dunno. What do you want?"

Gaz's smile vanished and she wrapped her arms, headlock-style, around her stuffed giraffe. She stared at him levelly as if he should already know the answer.

"Okay...then. Pancakes?"

She gave a tiny nod.

"With..." Johnny tried to think of what he would have liked as a child but then remembered that his childhood was missing from his brain. Flickers here and there but nothing as pleasant as pancakes. His brain skipped over this without the slightest melodramatic pause. "...chocolate chips? Kids like those, right?"

The nodding got faster and more frantic until Johnny wondered if her head might pop off like a Kewpie doll. Or an actual human head in a vice, now that he thought about it.

"Okay. Pancakes with chocolate chips. And bacon!"

"Orange juice?" the waitress asked.

"Soda." Johnny corrected. "Cherry Fizz Wizz."

"Coffee?"

"Fuck no!" he snapped.

"You shouldn't talk like that around a little kid."

"I'll talk however I fucking want around her. Now bring me cherries."

"You and the cherries," she hissed under her breath, and Johnny glared daggers at her until she finally wandered away with a vaguely sick look on her face.

It was just the two of them at the table now. The rest of the restaurant's patrons had returned to nursing their coffees or reading about dem Nicks in their day-old newspapers. Johnny stared at the tacky Formica table while Gaz kicked the heels of her feet against the booth. _Tap tap tap._

Not exactly the liveliest of conversations, but it was still a little better than sitting alone. People didn't' stare so much at a weird guy with a kid. Johnny realized that they probably thought he was spending his Friday visitation with his divorce baby. How fuckin' weird.

After a while Gaz got bored and started folding up her paper placemat into interesting shapes. Little balls of paper and squares and something half like an airplane. Johnny slid a knife out of his boot and helped her cut the paper into more manageable sizes. Here a crane, there a little stand-up table. Johnny made half a cootie-catcher and then forgot how and got angry and crumpled the thing up and threw it at her. Soon he and Gaz were quietly knocking the little ball of paper back and forth at each other. Psych-ward soccer.

He heard the _ding-click_ of the door and didn't bother looking up. The ball was too close to the end zone. Johnny made a dramatic save and tossed it back across the table toward her, only to have Gaz block it. Damn.

Whoever'd come in to the diner was ordering a single cup of black coffee to go. Typical. Johnny tried to focus on the paper ball as Gaz flung it back toward him. She even reared her arm back like a pitcher, heaving full-force. It struck him in the middle of the forehead with all the force of a kitten-sneezed typhoon.

Johnny grabbed the little ball before it could hit the table and looked for a bit at the neat little geometric crinkles in the paper. Very Escher. He ignored Gaz's huffing at having her game interrupted and when he finally looked up -

Devi D. was standing at the cash register halfway across the restaurant, waiting for her coffee. She had her hair back in a ponytail that looked more "samurai" than "cheerleader." The backpack slung over her shoulder had a giant button on it that said "More Monkeys More Problems."

Johnny wasn't sure if that was supposed to be funny or not. He was far too busy being terrified.

Frustrated with his departure from the game, Gaz had stood up on her seat. Johnny barely noticed her. He was too busy trying and failing to turn into a liquid and meld into the restaurant walls like a Terminator. The paper ball in his hands was getting smooshed into something almost diamond.

Gaz leaned over the table and grabbed for his hands. It surprised him so badly that he screamed "shit!" and flung himself back against the seat. Gaz squeaked and tumbled onto the table in a bundle of pajamas and dirty glares and amidst all of it, Devi looked over at them.

Her morning-gummed eyes widened into shock and then anger and then shock again when she caught sight of the kid. The coffee cup in her hand exploded when she slammed it down onto the counter in front of her, drenching the waiter who'd been trying to ring up her purchase.

Johnny's mind raced for exit strategies. He looked at the window beside them and wondered if the glass would break if he hit it straight-on with the end of his knife. Maybe he could throw Gaz under his arm and use the heads of the people at the other tables as stepping stones as he bolted for the door. Had he remembered to bring a pipe bomb with him?

All the while Devi was getting closer to them. That "I'm-willing-you-to-die" look shouldered on her face as she stomped down the aisle. Whatever scared-shitless face he was making must have been funny, because Gaz's own glare broke briefly and she grinned smugly up at him.

"It's not fucking funny," he said, daring to look away from the monstrous Devi.

"What's not funny?"

"Uh." Devi was speaking to him. He felt hot and sick and scared and weird. "Political cartoons."

She looked unamused. "Sure. Whatever. And who in the hell is this?"

A sharp and accusing finger shot out to point at Gaz, wiping the former smug grin clean off of her round face. Her normal bored-and-displeased expression replaced it as she glared at the finger dangerously near her nose.

"Her name's Gaz."

"Is that true?" Devi asked her, her finger still jabbing into Gaz's personal space.

The filthy look on Gaz's face hadn't faded. She leaned forward and opened her mouth and tried very earnestly to bite Devi on the knuckle. Little baby teeth clicked together in the air as Devi yanked her hand away just in time.

"Little bitch," she whispered.

"Gaz doesn't talk. Sorry, should have said something," Johnny said, although he wasn't able to stifle his grin.

"She doesn't talk? You didn't cut her tongue off, did you?!"

"What? No! She's got a tongue! Look! Gaz, show her your tongue."

Gaz obliged, sticking her little pink tongue out at both of them and then emphasizing it with a nasty raspberry.

Devi's expression didn't soften. "And - sorry to be rude about this - but where in the _fuck_ did you get a kid, Johnny?"

"She belongs to a friend of mine," he told her, which in his opinion was perfectly true. He'd given her to Edgar, and she was his as far as he was concerned. He was just borrowing her so he'd have a pancake partner and to make the voices in the house howl indignantly at him.

"Is your friend dead?!"

"I didn't kill her parents! Jesus, why does everyone keep asking that?! Oh, sure, you mow down a couple nuns, and suddenly you're a parent killer!" Johnny threw his hands in the air, exasperated. "No, he's not dead. His name's Edgar Vargas. Look him up if you don't believe me."

"Sorry," Devi said, extremely ungenuine, as she rammed her nearly-bitten knuckles into her hip. "I'm just trying to wrap my mind around the idea of you having non-mental friends who aren't dead."

Low blow. Johnny winced and bared his teeth and wrapped his bony fingers around the knife in the center of the table in warning.

"What does being mental have to do with it?"

"They'd have to be mental to let you babysit, Johnny. You're a greasy-haired psychopath."

"Thanks. I try. I'm sure Edgar won't mind me having her out - I'm going to bring her back in as many parts as I can. I just wanted some pancakes."

Devi stared at him for a second or two before breaking out into hysterics. "What?! You didn't even ask? Now you're a kidnapper too?! How many cheerleaders did you eviscerate before that got boring and you decided to start abducing children? I swear to God, Johnny, if you've got some harem of kids somewhere-"

"No!" he snapped, suddenly angry and twitchy, because there were accusations that were accurate (if unfortunate) and then there were those so sick and demented that he felt like even his deepest organs twisted in protest. "No! Nothing like that! Never! What in the hell is the matter with you?!"

"Just playing the odds here, Johnny. I mean if you've got one thing in common with Jeffery Dahmer - "

"Can you not? Please?" he cut her off. Something about her voice was making him sick; or maybe it was just the justified cruelty of it, he wasn't sure. "I didn't come all the way down here to be shit on by someone who's company I once enjoyed."

"Oh, I'm hurt," Devi fake-swooned dramatically, throwing one hand over her forehead. "It's the greatest tragedy of my young life, to know that I'm no longer being lusted after by an anorexic human butcher."

Johnny winced, cringed, looked at Gaz for help but received none. The little girl gave him a tiny shrug and nothing else.

"Are you done? I'd like to be left alone."

Devi huffed at him, glancing down at Gaz. "Fine. I'll go. But I want you to know that I think it's sick that you're spending time around children."

"Noted."

"I'll call the cops again. I really will. And not just because I think you're a bloody-handed psychopath -"

"I am, but continue."

"-but also because the idea of you spending more than five minutes around anything as squishy-brained as a little girl is pretty goddamned disturbing," she finished, crossing her arms over herself and standing so that she looked very tightly-bound.

Gaz had started to get bored during all of this. She'd made a sound not unlike a cat's growl at Devi calling her "squishy-brained," and was now yanking at Johnny's sleeve.

"I think we'll be fine," Johnny said, reaching up to give Gaz a reassuring pat on the head. She twisted around like a cat and sank her teeth deeply into his hand and his screeching mingled awfully with the sound of Devi's laughter as she turned her back on the two of them and walked out of the restaurant.

* * *

_Lyrics at the top credit to Blink-182, and their spectacularly immature song "What's My Age Again?" I promise the rest of the lyrics will be more quality. Longer chapter, and the first of many appearances by the lovely Devi! You didn't think I could write a JtHM fic without her, did you? She's one of JV's best characters, after all. _

_As always, reviews are loved and cherished, so please let me know if you like how things are going!_


	5. Returns Accepted

**Chapter 5: Returns Accepted**

_"I'm running dry of bad excuses_

_Don't want to lie or seem intrusive_

_But time hasn't told me anything _

_And neither has she."_

The cherry pancakes weren't as great as he'd expected, but Johnny was no stranger to disappointment by this stage of the game. He paid for their breakfast with a handful of crumpled and bloody dollar bills and dragged Gaz out of the restaurant with all the other patrons boring holes into his back with their eyes as they left.

His fragile ego was a little sore after Devi's tirade, and their staring made Johnny think very hard about killing one of them. Or all of them. Blood spilling into the coffee, all the pancakes red, a pile of organs arranged neatly on the bar counter like modern art. Then he'd realized that it would be nigh impossible to drag a corpse and a little girl home at the same time. Instead he kicked a hipster with a Mac laptop in the shin on the way out just to hear Gaz's morbid little giggle.

Not quite as satisfying as burying a knife into his ear, but Johnny did enjoy seeing him spill his organic soy latte all over his thrift-store plaid shirt.

By the time they'd wandered back to Edgar's apartment, Johnny thought that he and Gaz were both in slightly better moods. Well, okay, Johnny wasn't sure that he was. Devi'd spoken to him like he was scum, and the rather fantastical thing about that was that he actually cared (however minimal) about her opinion. Cruelty from her made him sick. Cruelty from strangers made him angry and made him thrash with knives and made him burn for bones bared to the air. There were much easier outlets for that second one.

They finally reached the door to Edgar's apartment. Gaz had been staring at the ground nearly the entire way there, and she nearly bumped into the backs of Johnny's legs when he stopped. Johnny felt her graze his pants leg. The door was kicked wide open as Johnny tried to get out of her way.

His original plan had been to sort of nudge Gaz into the front room and then be on his way. Back home to the hateful house that had become disturbingly familiar to him in all its horrors, like a wife-beating father who pays the electric bill. With the tip of one boot he prodded Gaz in the back, urging her into the kitchen. She took shuffling little steps, glaring back at him all the while.

"Go on. Im'ma leave," he said, intending to do so before Edgar could see them. Johnny peeked hesitantly around the door, wondering if he was even home.

He was. Edgar was clearly visible from the front door - he'd set up camp on the sofa in the living room, and didn't seem to have noticed them entering. Instead he had a phonebook spread out on his lap and was holding a cordless phone to his ear with one hand. The other hand was twisted up into his hair as if he were only seconds from wrenching a fistful of it out. He certainly looked agonized enough for it, and was speaking exasperatedly into the phone.

"Yes, yes, I've already spoken to the on-call officer, I want to speak to the chief, if you don't mind. I told you. She's got short purple hair, brown eyes, about five years old...her birthday? I'm not sure that I can...what does that matter? Don't you understand? She's gone!" Edgar stared at the ground, the phonebook sliding down his knees as he spoke. The hand that had been twisted up in his hair slid down to pinch the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, his expression all pained and tight.

Johnny coughed once very loudly to get his attention. Anything to scramble that annoying angst up a bit.

Edgar snapped his head up at the sound of Johnny's voice. He made some noise between "Gaz!" and "Aaugh!" and flailed the phone and the phonebook to the ground in a pretty spectacular explosion of pages and plastic. He leapt to his feet and made a mad dash for the two of them. Halfway across the living room, Edgar had to stop and scream as he stepped on a plastic dinosaur.

"Mother of -" he gasped, kicking the rest of the toys out of the way as he waded to the kitchen.

"You don't seemed like the type to leave a mess lying around," Johnny said, leaning slightly to one side so he could get a better look at the toys coating the floor in the living room. Now the telephone book and the cordless phone had joined them.

"I'm not! I put them all away last night before I went to bed and I honestly don't know how - Oh my God, Gaz! You're alright!"

Edgar seemed to decide on this second train of thought as the more important one. He rushed over to Gaz's side and scooped her up in his arms, knocking her stuffed giraffe to the floor in the process. If Gaz whined about this, then her protests went ignored: Edgar started fussing over the part in her hair and the stains on her pajamas.

It wasn't until he'd started counting all of her fingers that Gaz got annoyed with him and managed to wriggle out of his grasp like an unhappy cat. He settled for letting her stand on the kitchen table.

"Does anything hurt? Do you feel okay?" Edgar felt her forehead and she batted his hand away. "You didn't see anything that scared you, did you?"

Gaz shook her head, nodded, and then shook again.

"Jeez, she's fine. Enough with the helicopter parenting. It's good for kids to get abducted every once and a while. Builds character," Johnny said, from his ready-to-run post by the door, though Edgar didn't act like he'd heard him.

It took a few more minutes of fretting over Gaz before Edgar seemed satisfied that she was all in one piece. Johnny watched them uncomfortably, wanting to go but finding the whole scene very strange. Edgar must really have been a good guy to be relieved instead of angry at having his child-tumor returned to him. Several months of spying on the neighbors had shown Johnny that it wasn't uncommon for parents to resent their biological cretins, and Gaz didn't even really belong to Edgar in the gene-propagating sense of the word.

It really, truly surprised him. Other people's cruelty and selfishness never really did anymore - filled him with rage, sure, but not surprise. He felt some kind of prickling confusion as he watched the two of them, the non-father and non-daughter, followed by a stark realization that he did not belong here. He ought to leave.

Johnny put his hand on the doorknob to leave and managed to open it about three inches before Edgar looked up at him properly for the first time since he'd arrived.

"Where did you take her?" Edgar asked, his face still scrunched into an unreadable expression and one of his hands resting on Gaz's head.

The door clicked closed beneath Johnny's hand and he bit back a swear.

"We got some breakfast. The diner on the corner's really letting itself go. I left a human hand in the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom last time I was there and it was still there today! Can you believe that?!"

"Uhm...well, I've never really been there, actually, so I guess I can't say whether..." Edgar's gaze went vacant and he shook his head, pressing a few fingers to his temple. "Johnny, you didn't...you didn't take her to your house, did you?"

"Huh? No. The house doesn't like her. It would have probably gotten pretty ornery with me if I'd taken her over to meet Nailbunny. It's a real shame - I think they'd get along," he said, scratching reflectively at his chin.

Edgar just stared, still looking overwhelmed but not angry. "Thanks for that, at least. I don't think that I'd like the idea of Gaz spending time at your -"

Johnny raised an eyebrow and Edgar looked like he might cry.

"At my what?"

"At your house. Since that's where you...you know..." Edgar glanced down at Gaz. "I don't remember it being the most kid-friendly place."

"Oh. I don't particularly like spending time there myself. It's gotten very loud as of late. Angry with me. It was nice to spend a few hours out. She's good company," he said, nodding toward Gaz on the table who had Edgar by the hand and was trying to base-jump her way to the floor.

"Yeah. Yeah, she is. I've really enjoyed having her around. And when I woke up and she was gone..."

His voice trailed off as if he were waiting for Johnny to fill in the blanks for him. Johnny wasn't sure how, so he kicked at the welcome mat instead. The kitchen fell quiet and awkward until Gaz let out a high-pitched whine and Edgar picked her up and held her on his hip.

Johnny got the feeling that they didn't really need him anymore. Rarely did anyone. "Yeah. I'm gonna leave now," he said, turning his back on the two of them as he tried the door again.

Johnny was nearly all the way outside when he heard it:

"Nny! No! No!"

It was the first time that Johnny had heard her voice. It must have been Edgar's too, judging by the stunned look on his face that Johnny caught sight of as he threw himself back into the apartment in surprise. People usually didn't say his name like that. Gaz was flailing around in Edgar's arms, trying to get to the floor, and when he finally set her down she bolted over to Johnny's side and wrapped her tiny fingers around the laces of his boots.

"No," she repeated, craning her neck up to look at him.

"'No,' what, exactly?" Johnny asked. Gaz's shiny brown eyes narrowed as if he'd tricked her somehow.

"Just...no," and she dropped her gaze suddenly down to her feet as her already tiny voice got quiet.

"It's a pretty good word. Very useful. People are always telling me 'no,' but usually it's when I enter a room, not when I try to leave it." He nudged her back with his pointy boottip.

While they were speaking, Edgar seemed to be playing catchup with himself.

"You-you got her to talk!? Since when does she talk?!" he yelped suddenly, motioning as if he was going to start tearing at his hair again.

"I dunno. Just now, I suppose." He didn't see what Edgar was getting so worked up about. Gaz's speaking was her own business.

"But-but she's never - Gaz, I've been here with you for weeks and this is the first time you've -" Edgar made a sound that was half laugh and half sigh. Instead of yanking out his hair, he settled for planting a palm on his forehead. "What did you _do_, Johnny?"

"I was just trying to leave and-"

_"No,"_ Gaz interrupted.

"Yes, I got that. This kid's a bad judge of character, Edgar."

Edgar laughed for real and finally ran the hand on his forehead through his hair. "Heh. That seems to be the case. It figures, really. I wasted all of this time reading to her and buying her toys when all she really needed was to be kidnapped."

"Guess so," Johnny shrugged. And then to Gaz, with a twist of his ankle: "Let go of my shoes. Now."

She shot him a dirty look but obeyed, scurrying back to Edgar's side. On the way there she picked up her giraffe and tucked it up under her arm and glared at Johnny from behind Edgar's legs.

"Are you going to let Johnny leave now?" Edgar asked her.

Gaz peered up at him, one fist knotted into the fabric of his pants, and said finally: "I guess."

Johnny made no effort to hide his sigh of relief. He'd enjoyed his few hours of socializing - inasmuch as he was capable. Being sociable every once and a while was fun in a novel sort of way, but this was getting exhausting and annoying and there was just so much _living_ going on in Edgar's apartment. It felt writhing.

He clicked the door open -

"Sorry, Johnny - just one more thing."

Johnny's spine went ramrod straight and he hunched down in annoyance, casting a filthy look back at Edgar.

_"What?"_

"Thanks for bringing her back. Just - just if you want to borrow her again, please ask, alright?"

"You can call me Nny," he gritted out.

"Right. So I can. Thanks, Nny," and Edgar gave him a little up-nod. This seemed like a nice thing to do and it made Johnny a little overwhelmed in the wake of his simmering annoyance. He snapped the door open and bolted outside, slamming it forcefully behind him.

Edgar kept meaning to ask Gaz about her mother. About her home before. About that night when Johnny had brought her to him, very late, and unintentionally begun this bizarre serial-killer mandated fatherhood.

Now that she was speaking (even in brief, five-words-ish sentences) Edgar reckoned that she might be able to answer such questions. It would quiet his curiosity, at the very least. But she was still very quiet and it frightened him that he might silence her for good if he asked a question she didn't want to answer. And if she decided to be permanently mute because of his nosiness...well, Edgar wasn't sure that he would blame her.

So he didn't. Instead he asked her what kind of juice she wanted for lunch, or what color shirt she wanted to wear (usually black-and-purple or black-and-pink or black-and-black with a little bow just to keep her from looking like a homeless Lolita), and was always thrilled to have her answer.

These questions were easier.

Tonight he asked her: "What book do you want to read before bed, Gazzy?"

She looked up at him uncertainly from her eight-car Hotwheels pileup in the middle of the living room floor. "That's not my name."

"Sure it is."

"I'm 'Gaz.' Not 'Gazzy.'" And she narrowed her eyes at him with one tiny Jeep gripped in her fist.

"It's supposed to be endearing," he said, collapsing onto the floor next to her with an armful of picture books. Gaz watched him set her options out in a tidy row on the carpet in front of her.

"What's that mean?"

Edgar nudged the bottom of "Cautionary Tales for Children" so that the top was in line with "Danny the Dinosaur." Now that his apartment was full of stuffed animals and Fruit Loops he had to get his orderliness out somewhere.

"It's when you use silly names for people you like."

"Oh." She looked sullenly down at the books. "I want to read one about aliens."

"Aliens? I don't know if I have any like that. Would you maybe settle for -"

_RIIIIING. RIIIIIING. RIIIING. _

The phone in the kitchen had gone off. Edgar looked back over his shoulder at it quivering on the wall and leapt to his feet before it really sank in that someone was calling to speak to him.

_Oh God._ He wondered if it was Johnny calling for a chat. How would Johnny have gotten his number? That was a stupid question. He knew where he lived. That thought crawled around uneasily somewhere around his navel. Granted, Johnny was easier to deal with now than he'd been so many months ago in that dingy basement, but Edgar didn't exactly crave his company. He needed time to recover from today.

Thoughts wrestled around in Edgar's brain as he held onto the back of the phone before actually picking it up. It had rung nearly enough times to go to voicemail, but somehow the idea of not answering made him even sicker than the idea of hearing Johnny's voice again.

"Hello, this is Edgar Vargas."

A woman answered. Edgar felt the air rush out of him in relief.

"Good," she said, sounding annoyed. "Do you know how many Edgars I had to hang up on before I got to you?"

"Um, no. I'm afraid I don't. If you don't mind - may I ask who's calling?"

"Devi. My name's Devi."

"I don't think I know a Devi. Are you sure you haven't got the wrong Edgar?"

Devi ignored this. "You've got a kid, right? Named Gaz?"

"She's not really my -" Edgar looked out into the living room, where Gaz was watching him with a head-tilt and a half-confused expression. He couldn't bear to be so cruel. "Yes, I do. A daughter."

"Then you're the Edgar I want."

Edgar hoped very sincerely that this woman wasn't going to try and solicit money from him. He never turned them down, no matter how outrageous the charity (although the "Needles for Hungry Children" drive had given him pause). There was always the chance, however thin, that somewhere along the line his money might help someone, and that notion was always enough to get him to open his wallet.

Even so, this lady's tone wasn't especially pleading.

"I'm glad to know I'm the right person, miss. Was there something you wanted to ask me...?"

Edgar got a vision in his mind's eye of a girl winding a twisty phone cord around his finger as she spoke, popping her gum in between sentences. "Right. Right. Yeah. I just thought I'd call and let you know that a serial killer has abducted your daughter. Do my good deed for the day. He had her at the diner on the corner of Raefield and Hanover this morning."

From Devi's tone, she sounded almost bored by the notion of Johnny's eccentric and violent habits. Perhaps they'd known each other somehow.

Cramming the receiver against his ear with one shoulder, Edgar started heating up some water on the stove to make tea. This conversation was getting a long-ish feel to it. "Oh, yes. I'm aware. Apparently they went for pancakes."

"And you're...okay with this? Jeez, I wouldn't have gone through the trouble of finding you if I'd known you were going to be such a deadbeat parent about it." Devi huffed audibly into the mouthpiece on her end.

"Excuse me?" The metal pan in his hand smashed down against the stovetop, water splashing and hissing on the burners.

"Nothing. Forget I said anything. Load off of my mind, really. You have a good one, Mr. Vargas."

"Wait! Wait wait. Don't hang up on me. I appreciate you taking the time to call me - really, it was very kind of you - but Gaz is perfectly fine."

"Oh." She sounded legitimately surprised.

"Yes. Johnny brought her back safe and sound several hours ago. I wasn't thrilled about their surprise excursion but...she doesn't seem any worse for the wear." And just to make sure, Edgar glanced out into the living room. He felt a throat-to-stomach jerk when he couldn't find Gaz immediately, but after a few seconds of searching he realized that she'd joined him in the kitchen.

The chair at the table directly across from the fridge was the one she'd taken a liking to. Gaz's head was resting on her folded arms on the tabletop as she watched him talking on the phone. One of her eyebrows had disappeared up into her messy hair.

"You let Johnny around your daughter? You know what kind of guy he is, don't you?" Devi said. The sharpness tinging her words brought their conversation back to Edgar's attention.

"...Sort of. I feel like it would be presumptuous for anyone to think that they really know Johnny. But I'm aware that he has some...violent tendencies." Edgar glanced at Gaz out of the corner of his eye, but she didn't seem interested in what he was saying. She was staring at the refrigerator magnets. He abandoned the tea and got some packets of hot chocolate out of the cabinet for her.

"Yeah, you could say that. He's a psychopath. Which begs the question why you're letting him babysit if you're _not_ a deadbeat parent."

Perhaps, had it not been an already stressful day, Edgar wouldn't be getting so exasperated with this stranger who'd called him up out of nowhere to harass him over his parenting. Edgar tore open one of the hot chocolate packets with the closest thing to violence he could manage.

"He didn't ask my permission. I hardly think I'm to blame for what I _thought_ was a kidnapping. And Johnny might be unstable, but he seems to enjoy Gaz's company and Gaz enjoys his. Things could have ended much worse."

"Yeah, they could have. And they will, if Johnny's involved. This isn't any of my business, and I don't know where you know Johnny from, but bad things follow him. He can fuck your life up just by talking to you. Probably in ways you can't even imagine."

"Thank you for the warning," Edgar said, admittedly half-distracted by trying to get a couple of mugs out of the cabinet with one hand. Devi's advice seemed appropriately ominous, but Edgar wasn't quite so naive that he voluntarily sought out Johnny's company. Far from it. The maniac just kept weaseling his way back into his life without his consent. The very last thing he needed was warnings. Some kind of anti-lunatic spray, perhaps.

"If you don't mind me asking," he said, after a second of thinking, "How exactly do you know Johnny? I didn't get the feeling that he had many acquaintances."

Devi was silent on the other end of the phone for so long that Edgar had time to pour two cupfuls of hot chocolate and set the dirty pan in the sink. He checked the phone twice to make sure that she hadn't ended the call. And then, finally:

"We used to be very close friends. Then he tried to murder me, and I guess you can say that we've grown apart since then." Her voice was very quiet. She sounded like a different girl, and a far cry from the swearing, outraged one he'd heard a few minutes ago.

_Another survivor_, Edgar thought. Maybe they should start a support group. And then he wondered how stupid and lonely he must be to have started a friendship with Johnny because he'd nearly been killed, unlike this girl who had sense enough to get away from him after something similar had happened to her.

_Edgar Vargas: So lonely he makes friends with his attempted murderer. _

"I see. I can't say I'm unfamiliar with the experience. And not to come to his defense, or anything, but I do owe him a few things." Edgar set a mug of hot chocolate down in front of Gaz before taking a seat across from her at the kitchen table. She took a sip of her drink before looking up at him and giving a tiny nod. The queasy, uneasy feeling that Devi's conversation had given Edgar a few seconds ago vaporized.

"Huh. I didn't think he was in the habit of letting people live, generally. You'll have to tell me how you managed that sometime. No offense, but you don't sound like Chuck Norris over there," Devi said, the still and quiet tone she'd used before mercifully gone.

"None taken." He managed a laugh and Gaz eyed him suspiciously over her mug. "I was just lucky, I suppose. Tried to be kind to him. I don't think he was expecting that at the moment. A little faith doesn't hurt, in my opinion."

"I wouldn't know," Devi said stiffly. "Well, I guess it was nice talking to you, Eddie. Good to know your kid's alive. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go electroshock my memories of running into Johnny this morning out of my brain."

"It's 'Edgar,' actually, and I-"

The other end of the line had already gone dead. All Edgar could hear coming out of the earpiece was the _dun-dun-dun_ of the dial tone. He stared at the phone for a second or two before setting it down on the tabletop and picking up his own mug of hot chocolate.

"That was strange. Did you meet a girl named 'Devi' today?" he asked Gaz, still trying to puzzle out the call.

"Yeah," she muttered, staring down at her cup as she took a sip. "She yelled at Nny."

"That sounds believable."

"And she called him by the wrong name, too."

"Who?"

"Nny. She called him Johnny," and Gaz wrinkled up her face as if the name left a bad taste in her mouth.

"And what do you mean by 'too?'"

Gaz sighed exasperatedly and Edgar wondered if perhaps there wasn't something about him that annoyed women. "She called you 'Eddie' and Nny 'Johnny.' She got it backwards."

"Oh. Yes, I suppose she did. So I take it you approve of nicknames now?"

"…I guess. As long as they're not too stupid."

"'Gazzy' isn't stupid."

"Is too."

"Is not."

"What about 'Gazzilla'?"

"I'll work on it," Edgar said, smiling around his tepid mug of chocolate as he leaned back in the rickety chair and crossed one knee over the other. Considering the uneven panic he'd woken up in this morning, the day had ended up favorable. His gaze slid across the kitchen table to the island of the cordless phone and felt the tentative calm dissipate almost instantly.

"But Gaz," he said, still staring, "how did you know-?"

The sound of Gaz's mug smashing against the table cut him off. "I thought we were going to read a story?"

"We were, but-"

Too late. She'd already hopped off her chair and left him alone in the kitchen, now with an empty spot across from him to stare at in addition to the phone. Edgar shrugged, sighed softly, and followed her into the living room.

* * *

_Lyrics credit to "Emma" by Alkaline Trio. They're one of those bands I spent years trying to pretend were "just a nostalgic guilty pleasure lol," but that was a dirty lie. I've got six of their albums and zero regrets. They've got a very JtHM feel to them, if you ask me – it's all violent, gothy, self-aware adolescent angst for adults and I'll admit I like their music very much. _

_Anyway, if you get the chance, hit me up with a review and let me know what you thought of this chapter! I would love some feedback. I know things are still going slow, but the momentum's coming, I promise. Otherwise, have a good week and thanks for reading : )_


	6. Stay-At-Home Butcher

_Hey! I'd just like to give a shout-out to InvaderZimDibFan and Silvermoonmanga, who have been kind enough to leave reviews on several chapters. That's very sweet of you guys, and I really appreciate your feedback :)_

* * *

**Chapter 6: Stay-At-Home Butcher**

_"Come sit next to me  
Pour yourself some tea  
Just like Grandma made  
When we couldn't find sleep  
Things were better then  
Once but never again  
We've all left the den  
Let me tell you about it."_

"I don't want to go."

The bowl of oatmeal that Edgar had set down in front of Gaz went clattering across the table as she pushed it away. She folded her arms on the edge of the table and buried her face into the crook of her elbow.

Geez, he'd always thought that kids were supposed to hit at least twelve before they started moping.

"I'm sorry," Edgar sat down in the chair across from her and took a sip of his coffee. "But you've got to go to daycare."

He leaned forward and inched the bowl back onto Gaz's side. The look she gave him when she peaked over her arm and saw it there could have frozen vodka.

"Nuh-uh. No. I didn't used to go."

"I know. I wish I could stay here with you, too. But I've got to go to work."

"Why?"

"So that I can buy you oatmeal with dinosaur candy in it. Now eat your breakfast."

Gaz leered at her bowl for a second or two before slumping down into an unhappy heap in her chair. "I don't want it. Oatmeal's stupid."

"It's breakfast. It can't be stupid."

"Daycare is stupid, then."

Edgar watched her over the rim of his coffee mug, trying to work out whether she was just being fussy or if something was legitimately wrong. Perhaps both. She was a difficult child to read, even now that she was willing to talk to him. Better not ruin an opportunity.

"What makes it stupid? No one's mean to you there, are they?" Even as he said it, the thought made him a little sick and nervous. He couldn't imagine Gaz being roughed up too badly by any of the other kids, but a cruel teacher could wreak havoc on the tender mind of any child.

Gaz shook her head 'no' and Edgar felt a bit relieved. "All the kids there are doofuses."

"Maybe if you just got to know them-"

"No. They're dumb. All they want to do is eat chalk. I hate all of them."

Edgar winced; he wasn't sure that a child so young should go around saying that they hated their peers. She'd be an absolute misanthrope by the time she was old enough to work on her first group project.

"'Hate' is a very strong word."

"I know. That's why I said it."

"Still. I wish you wouldn't talk like that," and as soon as he said he regretted it because she hunkered down against her bowl of oatmeal and took an angry bite and refused to look at him.

All she said was "Hmph."

Damn it. How had he managed to upset her so easily? Was he really so bad at this? Out of practice, maybe. Interacting with someone (even a child) on a daily basis was worlds away from making small-talk at work over the bagel table at work.

"You can take your giraffe with you," he tried.

She took a loud bite of cereal and still pretended to ignore him. Edgar felt his shoulders slump.

"When I was little, I really liked going to school," he said, trying his coffee again. It was a bit stronger than he liked, even after adding all that sugar. When he set the cup back down, Gaz was sitting up and staring at him.

"You used to be little?"

He laughed at her and then felt bad about it when she glared. "Of course. Everyone's little at one point or another."

"And you liked going to school?" She wrinkled up her nose in disbelief.

"Sure."

_"Why?"_

And Edgar realized now that he'd talked himself into a corner and was going to have to answer her. It had always been unfortunate how rarely the idea of lying occurred to him. Plus he'd been told he was terrible at it. He stalled and took another drink of too-strong coffee and answered her over the rim of the cup.

"Well, you know. You get to learn things, and play with other kids, and...and I never really liked being at home, I suppose."

Gaz stirred her oatmeal and seemed oblivious to the disgusting squishing sound it made. "What's wrong with being at home? I like being at home. All my toys are here. You're here."

She didn't look at him when she said it, nor did she have the slightest hint of affection in her voice, but Edgar still smiled. The approval of a surly child was quite an honor in his book. He tried to keep this in mind as he organized his thoughts before speaking again.

"There's nothing wrong with being at home. It's just that...when I was a kid, no one at home much liked me. And it's not any fun to be somewhere if no one likes you."

Gaz stopped stirring her cereal. "Not even your parents?"

"I didn't have any. Still don't, I suppose. They died when I was very small. My sister and I lived with relatives, and I never got the sense that they cared much for having an extra pair of kids around -"

Edgar had been staring at his coffee mug, and when he looked up, Gaz was gaping wide-eyed at him. A spoon full of oatmeal hovered between her bowl and her half-open mouth.

"Like me?" she said, very quietly. He was glad that she didn't sound frightened, but worried that her voice was almost angry. A hurt sort of anger, maybe, that grew from turmoil. Edgar realized that he didn't think as often as he should about the fact that Gaz wasn't a divine orphan placed on his doorstep as a test from God. A mother had been killed for her to reach him.

Edgar reached across the table to ruffle her curly purple hair.

"No. Not like you. You have me. And I am very happy that you're here," he said, and it was true. He'd forgotten how much it meant to care about something else. It was more than any of his own childhood guardians had given him.

She didn't recoil from him like a cat, and that was something. The corner of her mouth quirked up the tiniest bit and she buried herself in her oatmeal.

"Oh. Okay. I still...I still wish I didn't have to go to daycare, though," she admitted.

"I know. I'm sorry. I really am. But neither of us has much say in the matter. If I miss any more work they'll fire me, and there's no one else to watch you."

Gaz looked up from her bowl. "Nny could watch me."

"That," Edgar got up to put his coffee mug in the sink, "is debatable. And either way, I'm not entirely comfortable with calling him up on a random Wednesday just so that he can -"

And just as he spoke, Edgar heard the doorbell buzz. His cup clattered loudly into the bottom of the sink as he dropped it, coffee splashing out onto the counter. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gaz sit up straight in her chair.

Who in the hell...?

Oh, it couldn't be.

"Somebody's at the door. The bell's annoying," Gaz said.

"I'll get it. Stay right there, okay?" Edgar told her, as she started to get down from her chair. "Finish your breakfast."

She huffed at him, but obeyed. Whoever was at the door started knocking instead of buzzing, although Edgar realized that he was being hopelessly naive with himself to think that it could be anyone other than Johnny.

"I'm coming!" Edgar called, though he wished that he wasn't. It wasn't until the words left his mouth that it occurred to him that he could have simple gathered Gaz up and hidden in one of the back rooms until Johnny went away. Probably wouldn't have worked, anyway. The madman had a way with locks, as Edgar and the hardware store had learned last week.

Edgar opened the front door and sure enough, there was Johnny. One of his fragile-looking hands was half-raised as if he'd been knocking on the door just as Edgar opened it. He tried to ignore how much the positioning made it look like Johnny was getting ready to hit him.

"Good morning," he said instead, trying very casually to block off the door. Just in case. Gaz could probably see him from the kitchen but Edgar didn't want to frighten her by looking like he was trying to keep an intruder out.

As if Johnny could frighten Gaz. The kid was unshakeable.

"Not really," Johnny responded. He took the hand that had been hovering in the air and rubbed at the back of his neck. "Is it really morning? Whatever time of day it is, it's pretty shitty. I think I stepped in gum on the way over here."

Johnny twisted himself into half a yoga pose to stare at the bottom of his boot for a second or two before continuing.

"What in the hell is the matter with people, leaving gum on the sidewalk?! Just swallow it! It won't fucking kill you! If I hear one more mother telling their snot-nosed little kid that gum builds up in your intestines like a tumor I'm going to gut them and PROVE that it isn't true." He didn't really meet Edgar's eyes as he spoke, looking instead at somewhere just past his shoulder, but his heavy-browed look of annoyance never faltered.

Edgar didn't doubt him for an instant. "It's a very popular old wives' tale, I think. If it makes you feel any better, I promise I've never told Gaz that. I'm not even sure -"

"Wait, it's morning?" Johnny interrupted, finally looking at him.

"Yes. It's 8:12." Edgar had looked at the clock on the microwave right before he came to the door.

"Are you having breakfast?"

"Gaz is, I don't really - we don't have any pancakes, if that's what you're after. I'm very sorry."

"Oh," Johnny deflated the slightest bit and Edgar thought suddenly about the nearest weapon. He had an umbrella in the coat closet and maybe he could - "That's okay. I feel kind of sick, actually."

"Something wrong?" Edgar asked, his stupidly nice personality showing through. Stupidly, asininely nice. Even to serial killers.

"Ugh. Yes. It's the fucking...It's the goddamned..."

Edgar waited for Johnny to find his words. Gaz coughed in the other room and Edgar was vaguely aware of so much profanity so near to her.

"...The house is angry at me again. Piece of shit. I oughta burn the place down. It gets so pissed off and so LOUD that I can't think straight and all the words. The words are everywhere, Edgar! I can't get away from them. It thinks that if it confuses me badly enough I'll just stay inside!" Johnny spoke in an explosion of exclamations, so quickly that Edgar barely caught half of them. He tried to make do with what he'd heard.

"Why...um...why do you think the house is angry with you?" he asked, trying to pretend like it wasn't an insane person's problem.

Johnny almost hissed as he spoke. "It thinks I'm making friends. Pisses it off, I think. Maybe it's afraid of being alone. Funny, huh? It wants me, but I control me."

"You certainly do," Edgar tried. Johnny nodded in agreement

"Yes. Yeah. That sounds good. I feel better when I'm here. Not necessarily here. Well, yeah, here. Better when I'm out. Away from the stupid house. I hate that fucking house. Can I come in?"

Edgar had been too distracted trying to follow Johnny's jittering speech to notice when he asked a question. The two of them hovered awkwardly in silence before it occurred to him that he was supposed to answer.

"Um - I mean if you really - I'm getting ready to go to work, is all, and -" He said, stutteringly polite, somehow as upset by the idea of a murderer in his house as he was by the fact that their morning routine was being disrupted.

Johnny didn't seem to hear him. "Thanks, I think I will come in."

With a strength that seemed disproportionate to his skinny frame, Johnny pushed Edgar against the doorframe and let himself into the apartment. It was the way someone might shuttle a dog out of the way trying to get into the bathroom.

"But I di - " Edgar stopped himself, because Johnny was already past the foyer and there was very little he could do at this point. He tried (badly) to convince himself that there was nothing to worry about. Johnny had had ample opportunities to eviscerate both he and Gaz over the past few weeks, and had consistently failed to do so. If Edgar didn't know any better he'd almost say that the lunatic liked their company. What that said for Edgar and his purple-haired ward, he didn't know.

By the time he made it to the kitchen, Johnny and Gaz were already thick into conversation.

"Oatmeal is gross." Gaz was saying. "Even with the dinosaur candy in it."

"Yeah, but think of all that fiber," Johnny crossed his legs and leaned back in the chair that Edgar had occupied only a few minutes ago.

"I don't care about fiber."

"_Everyone_ should care about fiber."

"Why?"

"It helps when you -"

"Okay!" Edgar yelped, running a hand through his hair in exasperation. What a three-ring circus his morning had become. "Okay, I think that's enough. Gaz, if you're done eating, please go put on your shoes. Johnny, would you like some coffee?"

Both of them exploded at him simultaneously.

"I fucking hate coffee! No! I don't want any damned coffee! These middle-aged yuppies and their Starbucks fixes, these assholes defined by what liquid chemicals they can pump into their bodies, I swear I -" Johnny started ranting, throwing his hands in the air as he roared. But Johnny had almost nothing on Gaz.

"I DON'T WANT TO GO!" she shrieked, managing to cut Johnny off. Both he and Edgar gaped at her, neither one used to being screamed at and especially by such a small and quiet child. Edgar recovered first, while Johnny continued to look vaguely stunned.

"Gaz, we've already talked about this. You've got to go. Just because Johnny's here -"

"Nny should watch me instead," she said flatly, as if this negated the nasty tone she'd used before. Gaz even folded her hands neatly on her lap as she dangled her feet off her chair. What a _scene_.

"I am sure," Edgar said, trying to maintain some sense of composure and forcing himself not to glance at the clock because he was going to be late if they weren't careful, "that Johnny doesn't want to be anyone's on-call babysitter."

At least Edgar hoped that this was true, because he didn't think it would be polite to mention that he wasn't terribly keen on a serial killer babysitting his adopted daughter. Maybe he could set up a playdate between them or something, but -

Johnny spoke before Edgar could elaborate, throwing one arm over the back of his chair as if he was getting comfortable. "Eh...sure. I guess I could stay here for a while. I don't really want to go home right now. That damned house is probably still angry, and there's this guy on the third basement floor with a chopstick rammed through his nose who's gotten _really_ annoying lately. You've got some Frooty Pops, right?"

"Told you," Gaz said, sounding awfully smug for a child.

"And I suppose I don't get any say in this at all?!" Edgar gasped.

A wave of head-shakes and shrugs from the two of them.

Edgar grabbed his coffee mug off of the table and took a long drink from it as he tried to calm himself down. Caffeine for agitation, sure, why not. It took him a second or two to realize that it suddenly tasted like mud and he grimaced at the flavor before slamming the cup back down.

"What is the matter with this coffee?! You all didn't put something in it, did you?" he demanded of them. Johnny just shook his head and Gaz's icy leveled stare never faltered.

"You poured that out," she said.

"What? No I didn't. I couldn't have. It's sitting right here."

"I don't care. You poured it out before."

Edgar sighed loudly. "Then why is it back here on the table?"

"I dunno. But it's not supposed to be," she shrugged. "So can I stay home, or what?"

The bitter-tasting coffee was still gnawing at Edgar's tongue. He sucked at his teeth and rubbed at his temple, thinking. Trying to ignore the sprawled-out killer and the stern-yet-fussy little girl that had recently become so central to his life. It seemed like Johnny had made up his mind to stay here for the day no matter what anyone said. Edgar wasn't inclined to try and move him, anyway.

Leaving Johnny here with Gaz for an entire day was what concerned him. He was glad that Gaz wasn't whiney or fearful or otherwise annoying and likely to set off Johnny's temper. Only a week ago Johnny had spent several hours with her in public at that diner (allegedly) without too much damage to either of them. And right now he wasn't acting threatening, at least not to them.

(Johnny was tracing letters onto the kitchen table with his fingernail, disrupting the wood grain as he did so. It left behind nasty marks that made Edgar itch a little, until he saw Gaz tracing after them with one finger. The insane games of a child and a killer were ones he'd never understand.)

And as pathetic as it was, Edgar hated to tell her "no."

"I suppose...I mean, if Johnny's really alright with it...I can let you stay at home today. _If_ he says it's okay, that is," he said, looking deliberately across the table at Johnny as he vainly hoped for a way out of the situation.

It was probably foolish of him to rely on Johnny for help in this department, especially since it took him about thirty seconds of confused staring before he seemed to realize that Edgar was waiting for a response. "Sure, I guess. She's tolerable enough company."

(Gaz looked immensely pleased with herself as Johnny said this.)

"Alright," Edgar said, sighing. "Alright. Just - Just please try and stay in the apartment, okay? No joyriding or pancakes or anything like that. There's plenty of food around, and I've got cable and books," he pointed out into the living room, "so you really shouldn't need to leave."

He was mostly concerned that Johnny might take Gaz on a murdering field-trip; at least if they stayed home the carnage would be limited to his possessions.

"What if there's an _emergency_? What if the Squid People finally rise up and take back the surface and claim our technology as their own!? Are we still grounded _then_?!" Johnny asked, knotting his fingers into his hair and looking very serious.

"Yeah! Also what if dinosaurs?!" Gaz went along, half-laughing.

"If squids and/or dinosaurs threaten the apartment, then you can leave. We'll meet up at the Unicorn Thicket after I've fought through the zombies that will inevitably be threatening me at the office. _Otherwise_, I would really like it if the two of you stayed here," Edgar scoffed in disgust as his ridiculous sentence.

Johnny nodded. "That's a good plan. You're a smart guy, Edgar."

"I try." Edgar paused as he stalled a bit longer. "Is there anything else you think you might need while I'm at work?"

"Ugh! No! We'll be _fine_," Gaz said. "Stop whining and just _go_!"

And after ten more minutes of fussing and stalling and writing emergency phone numbers on the notepad on the fridge, Edgar did exactly that.

* * *

_Beginning lyrics belong to the infamous Weezer and their song "My Name is Jonas," which all of you have heard at least once, I'd wager. Next chapter is going to be pretty cool, I think; Johnny and Gaz are going to get up to some predictably bizarre babysitting hi-jinks, so I hope you all like how that goes. And, as always, I love reviews, so I would be thrilled to hear what you're thinking about my little story here. Comments of any sort are always welcome. Anyway, enjoy the chapter if you can, and I'll be around again next week. _


	7. Another Day, Another Wall

**Chapter 7: Another Day, Another Wall**

_"Take a look, see, I painted you a picture.  
It's black and white except the blood's a little richer  
Down in the corner where I gave it my signature  
And then I titled it 'This One's For the Winter.'  
Check it out, you'll see it's just a big disaster."_

If someone (besides himself) had put a gun to Johnny's head and asked him how he ended up playing Candyland on the floor of Edgar's apartment while puppets tried to solve the life-changing mystery of "one plus one" on the TV, he wouldn't have known what to tell them. His brains would have ended up all over the wall. In all honesty the last thing he remembered clearly was the walls of his house calling him a "useless waste-of-space faggot" before he finally stormed out into the far quieter world outside. And then, somehow, in a whirlwind of half-remembered conversations, he'd ended up here, with Gaz as company.

He supposed that there were worse ways to spend days.

They spent a few hours conducting Lego sieges, with dramatic swordfights between square-headed combatants and at least a few deaths by Lego dragon. Johnny found it very fun to imagine up horrific backstories for each minifigure, and then felt tremendously satisfied when they were imaginarily impaled or thrown from the castle battlements.

"This guy," Johnny said, handing Gaz a red-bearded Viking, "He ate a whole village of children and then lied about it on his taxes. What should happen to him?"

Gaz looked at the toy thoughtfully for a second or two. "I think that he should get his head cut off."

"Excellent choice, though a little clichéd." Johnny obliged either way, popping the figure's head off and sending it flying across the room.

"Wait! That's wrong! You're supposed to use an axe!" Gaz wailed, digging a little plastic executioner's ax out of her Lego box and forcing it into his fingers.

"Sorry, my bad. I'll use that on the next one, I promise."

After Legos got boring, they switched to hide-and-seek. Both Gaz and Johnny were equally matched, because Johnny's skinny body could contort into very strange places (like under the couch), whereas Gaz had been living in the apartment for nearly a month now and knew all the best nooks and crannies for hiding. Apparently Edgar made unreasonable demands like bathing and bedtimes, and hiding was the best solution to them. The fact that both of them tended to get impatient and reveal themselves before the other could find them made the game go faster still.

For lunch they had ramen noodles (spicy chicken, Johnny's favorite) and toast and ice cream at the end because Johnny's grasp of the Food Pyramid was tenuous at best. Gaz didn't seem to mind. She sat across from him at the table and they both agreed that the crust part of toast was stupid and no one should have to eat it.

And something very strange happened, while Johnny was finding ways to keep he and this little girl occupied for an entire day, trapped in Edgar's apartment: he enjoyed himself. Not in the ecstatic, thrill-giggling way of a child at a theme park, or the life-affirming rush-of-happiness way of someone who'd narrowly avoided death (Johnny _hated_ that look on people's faces and was sure to kill them soon afterwards.)

It was a quiet sort of contentment. It was a break from screaming morons in torture boxes and voices in the walls insulting him and his constant confusion about the state of reality. If he ever got disoriented about what they were doing or why he was here, Gaz managed to answer him in simple and non-judgmental terms. Gaz kept him distracted just enough. They made a mess of Edgar's obsessively neat apartment, and that made the place feel almost comfortable. It was a good day.

Sometime in the afternoon, Johnny asked Gaz if she had any paint.

"Huh? What kind of paint?" She looked up from the Play-doh monstrosities strewn across the coffee table. Most of them were little people who'd been somehow dismembered, with the occasional carefully-made dog or cat scattered around.

"Any kind. I like oils. Acrylic. Tempera, I guess, if I must. Charcoal's doable. Paintbrushes too," he said, counting off the different types on one hand.

Gaz bit her tongue as she thought. "Egar bought some. They're in my room in the closet."

_"Egar." Not "Edgar." _

"Do you have all the colors?"

She only shrugged. It occurred to Johnny that there were technically infinite colors and it was fairly unlikely that Edgar had bought all of them. That would have been cool, though. The entirety of the spectrum available to his artistic judgment. Ah, but that would make blending so much more difficult. How many colors did he really use, anyway?

Johnny kicked these thoughts around as he fetched the shoebox full of paint from Gaz's bedroom. The little tubes rattled around against even dinkier paintbrushes, but they would do. He liked using his fingers as much as anything else.

Now for a canvas.

He turned on the spot, searching for a good place to set up. All these blank peach-colored walls. Now that Johnny looked at them, really took notice of the place, the walls seemed so quiet. Not that he missed his walls at home, that screamed and swore and despised him, but these walls were unsettling in their quietness. There wasn't any art or staining or anything. Blank and dead but somehow not very peaceful.

This needed badly to be remedied. Johnny figured he could oblige.

Gaz continued playing quietly at the coffee table while he got things settled. He mixed some colors on a paper plate, dragged a chair in from the kitchen, hissed a curse at the potted plant in the corner that had been giving him dirty looks. Johnny selected the blank wall between the television and the hallway as his victim.

He'd been fairly resentful of painting walls not so long ago. All that wasted blood, Edgar's blood, slavery in crimson, just to feed that fucking thing. He'd hated it so. Once he'd thought of gashing his own throat out and bleeding down into the grates to slake the monster's thirst with the blood of its own servant. Poetry.

But this was a different wall, in a much softer house. Johnny wrung out his hands until the knuckles popped trying to think about it. This wall would be better for having been painted. It would be beautiful and _cool_ and a gift, maybe, to someone. That was it. Everyone liked gifts.

This was the first time in months and months that the urge to paint had bubbled up inside him. It was a soft and quiet burning churning thing, one that had taken him over so suddenly. (He hugged at his arms and tried not to scratch as he looked at the blank wall and envisioned ways of covering it). It would be stupid to ignore it, regardless of his negative associations with painting walls. Painting after months of stick-figure Noodle Boys was like heroin after methadone.

Finally, Johnny picked up one of the cheapy paintbrushes. He stabbed it into a little puddle of Navy Blue, and went to work. Figures poured out from the place on the wall where he'd started - skeletal animals, curled tentacles, roving eyes and mechanical flourishes added for a bit of variety. Johnny was nothing if not abstract. He breathed the colors in and let them stew in his lungs for a second or two before heaving them out through the brush and onto Edgar's wall.

Soon he'd coated the better part of it. Bleach-white gnashing teeth fought for territory with swirling vine-like green monstrosities, stretching from the baseboards to an inch or so above Johnny's head. He always shaded with blue. The mural moved as Johnny added to it, growing to cover more than he'd intended. Every little creature or design grew naturally from the one before it, spiraling out of control from the source near the center. Johnny felt like he was bringing toxins to the surface of the wall to take shape beneath his hands. Purifying the darkness, if there was any here.

Johnny smeared off-color paint all over himself as he went. His fingers stained black, spots smudging beneath his eyes, his pants ruined. He took a second to look down at his Technicolor body and noticed that Gaz was sitting motionless by his feet.

"Oh. How long have you been there?" he asked, because he'd legitimately forgotten her. Oops. That kind of thing tended to happen when art was at stake. It wasn't anything personal.

"A little bit. That's pretty cool." She nodded her head toward his painting, heaving the stuffed giraffe up a little higher in her arms. Apparently she'd found it while he'd been working. Johnny narrowed his eyes at the thing but managed not to curse it.

"Thanks. I haven't painted anything in quite some time. It's not too bad," he said, daubing a little extra white eye-shine on one of the coiled monsters just to the left of the TV antenna.

"What's that supposed to be?" Gaz pointed to a gruesome-looking thestral with wings made out of bloodied knives.

"Oh." Johnny squinted at it. "I think it's a...death...Pegasus sort of thing. I'm honestly not too sure."

"You don't know?"

"Not...not always. Sometimes the pictures come out on their own. Like they've always been there. Or here, rather," he tapped the side of his head, "Just waiting for me to let them out. It's much better letting things out than it is trying to keep them in."

He knew from experience. Gaz nodded slowly and appreciatively, her stuffed giraffe falling slack in her arms.

"I want to try," she said. There was a square foot or so of blank and still-peach wallpaper near the floor, right at her eye level, and she jabbed a finger toward it.

Johnny couldn't think of any pertinent reason to deny her. Art was good for everyone, after all. People without art or kindness were just animals. Besides, he was sort of curious what her little brain would concoct.

"I guess that would be okay," he said finally.

He peeled off a paper plate from the back of his own ghetto palette (these cheap ones always stuck together - you couldn't get one without getting three). The paint from his fingertips smeared all over as he got her set up with her own colors. Red and yellow and blue were important, then a little black and white, and then some brown because it was a bitch to mix on its own.

Gaz took the plate from him with all the appropriate reverence and jammed one of her fingers down into the blue before smearing a tiny arc of navy across the wall. Then she mixed some of the blue and red together on her plate (ruined fingernails) until she had a satisfactory purple. Damn, he should have thought of that. Purple was a great color. Gaz took her makeshift purple and started finger-printing swirlies and pockmarks over her little allotted spot of wall.

The stuffed giraffe fell abandoned to the floor. Johnny felt a bit triumphant, although he wasn't really sure why. Perhaps he just liked that she'd dropped the damned thing. Now it was just the two of them painting.

So they did. Side-by-side, with only the sound of the droning TV and the squish-flick-scrape of paints and brushes. They traded colors with each other wordlessly. When Gaz's hands got too messy she wiped them on her overalls or Johnny's pants. He didn't mind too awfully much - it was one of the best conversations he'd had in a long time. It was the quiet language of creation, vomited up across Edgar's too-blank walls.

Gaz finally stepped back to admire her handiwork, and Johnny did the same. They'd laid down a thick coat of paint across a spot well over the size of a door, leaving their permanent mark on Edgar's apartment. Johnny planted a hand on his waist, letting his brush fall the floor and totally negligent over the paint inevitably ruining the carpet. He'd created something satisfying, fueled by inspiration and company rather than rage and hatred. He'd had _help_.

Johnny let himself smile a bit. Something suspiciously like pride smoldered in his insides. He let it burn itself out, soon to be replaced by annoyance or self-loathing, but there nonetheless.

"Egar's gonna be mad," Gaz said finally. She'd picked her stuffed giraffe back up and smothered it under one arm.

"Why?"

"We made a mess."

Johnny made a pfft-ing scoff sound, the nuances of which were probably lost on the little girl next to him. "You call this a mess? It's not a real mess until someone's lost bowel control."

"Ew."

"You're telling me. I'd rather clean blood out of the carpet any day."

"He doesn't like messes, though."

"I'd noticed," Johnny said, glancing around at the scrubbed baseboards and tidy corners where he and Gaz's carnage had managed not to reach.

"I'm home," came a voice from the kitchen.

"Speak of the devil," Johnny swore.

They must have both missed the door opening. There was a _thunk-slam_ as Edgar dropped his briefcase onto the kitchen table before wandering into the living room.

"Mmyep," Johnny said, still looking over the mural and not particularly motivated to turn around. Unwilling to be so cold, Gaz abandoned her post by his side and must have dashed over to see Edgar.

"Hello, Gazzy. Did you have a good day here with Johnny?"

"It's 'Nny,'" he called over one shoulder, and was promptly ignored.

"Mhm. We killed all my Lego guys. Mostly they deserved it."

"That's...very nice. Did you have carrots for lunch?"

"No. We had ice cream, though."

"Even better," Edgar said, with badly-hidden stiffness in his voice. He at least made an effort. "And what else?"

Gaz was starting to sound bored. "We painted."

"Oh, really? I'd like to see what it was. Where's your picture?"

"On the wall."

"On the - on the wall? On the wall! What on earth -"

Edgar drew up to Johnny's side, with Gaz balanced on his hip. His mouth was hanging half-open as he gaped at their work of art. Little half-words leaked out. A "what" here and a "but-" there, not a lot of nouns. Edgar threw a hand out in front of him and then let it fall limp to his side. The thing about Edgar was that he was constantly on the very brink of expressing his feelings about things, and then always felt short. Johnny thought that that seemed exhausting.

"You like it?" he asked, trying to give Edgar an out.

"I-I mean, it's very nice, Johnny. I especially like the um - the blue, and the, er..." He flailed about desperately for something to say. "I-I'm sorry, I've just never been very good with art."

"Most people aren't. It's a complex method of personal expression. Much more so than rearranging other people's insides, anyway. There are only so many ways to do that." Johnny reached out and drew a finger slowly across a portion of the mural where the paint had already dried, tracing the iron-colored spine of a monster.

"If you don't mind me saying, I like the painting much better than the alternative. It is certainly very...interesting. Nothing I ever could have come up with, anyway. Really livens up the room." Edgar shifted Gaz to his other hip, clearly uncomfortable in a variety of ways, nearly enough to make Johnny laugh. People were always uncomfortable around him - so much so that it was rare he really noticed it - but Edgar went through more trouble to hide it than anyone he'd ever met. Johnny appreciated this.

"Thanks. I missed painting."

"When was the last time you did this...?" Edgar gestured vaguely before suddenly looking sick. "Instead of...instead of that other thing...?"

"Hm? Oh, geez. I don't know. Months. Maybe? It's...it's hard for me to tell how much time has passed, really. Longer than I'd like. Your creativity and talent start to fester the rarer that they're used, and I have the bad habit of finding other...outlets." Johnny noted that he felt much, much better after an hour or two of painting than he would have felt after six hours of murdering people, however. Art was more his calling than death, but it was also easier to fail at.

"So I've heard. Still, though. It's very good, for your first piece after so long a hiatus."

"Gaz helped," and he pointed toward Gaz's little corner near the floor.

"She told me. Here, show me what you painted," Edgar said, heaving her to the ground beside the part that she'd marked off as her own. He even knelt down onto the carpet.

Planting a finger solidly on the wall, Gaz indicated her contribution to the mural.

"It's right here."

Johnny hadn't taken much notice of it before. She'd sketched out a bizarre-looking animal there; it looked a bit like Johnny's own creations but yet somehow was very different. It was more crude, more stark and ancient at the hands of a child. The thing had spindly tentacles that jutted out from its body and tapered to needle points, and two wide, black and dead eyes in its middle. Gaz hadn't made even the vaguest attempt at symmetry. Its colors were a mixture of blue and sick-purple and black, flaky edges.

The little picture made Johnny immediately sick.

"Oh, neat," Edgar was saying, totally oblivious. "What is it?"

"I think it's a t'octopus," she said, tracing the outline of the wretched thing with one finger. The nausea thrashing around in Johnny's stomach got stronger as she touched it.

"I think you mean 'octopus.' How many arms has it got?" Trust Edgar to turn that monstrosity into a learning experience.

"They're supposed to have eight. This one has six." As she counted, the stuffed giraffe shifted in her arms and started staring at him. It kicked Johnny's level of discomfort up to ten.

"No." Johnny snapped. "No, it's got more than that. You just can't see them. It's got hundreds. They go deep down." He started scratching at his arms, trying to find a physical outlet for the sick-crawly grossness that the picture had dredge up in him.

Edgar turned to look at him curiously. "Are you okay, Johnny?

"No. No. I don't like that thing. Why would you draw that? There's something wrong with it. I-I-" and he dug his fingernails into his upper arm until he felt the skin starting to give.

"Don't do that." Edgar stood and reached toward him, but Johnny dodged quickly out of the way. He felt sure he'd snap in half if someone touched him. He'd implode into dust right there on Edgar's now paint-splattered carpet. Or, more likely, he'd snap someone else in half and calm with their cooling blood.

"There's a thing on the wall. Monster in the wall. That's never good. How did you know, Gaz? Huh? Did that giraffe tell you?!" Johnny yelped, pointing aggressively at the toy. He needed something to blame it on. No, no, the thing in his wall was dead - it was dead and gone, it couldn't be here. No, no, he was wrong, it was all wrong. How hadn't he noticed?

Gaz clutched the stuffed animal closer to her body, her eyes wide and shining but her mouth tightly shut. She bit her bottom lip. Very slowly, Edgar stepped in between them.

"It's fine, J- Nny. I promise. She was probably just trying to imitate what you drew, see?" and Edgar waved vaguely at Johnny's own paintings, some of which were also tentacled and hollow-eyed.

"I'd never make anything like that!" He hissed, though admittedly a bit thrown off by Edgar's pointing. Logic told him that Edgar was probably right, but his spastic Insanity Compass told him that something was wrong here.

"Okay, okay. Calm down. There's nothing wrong. It's just a little doodle." Edgar's voice was very steady and he held one placating hand out, but Johnny wasn't stupid. The other man's fingers quaked ever so slightly and his eyes were far too wide for him to be anything other than terrified. Much more so than the little Gaz standing still and quiet behind him.

"Like hell there's nothing wrong! You wouldn't know. You never saw it."

"Saw what? What is it? Explain what you mean. I might not understand, but I'll try," Edgar said softly.

Johnny felt blood welling up into his fingernails from where he'd been scratching at his arm, slick and warm between his fingers. Somehow that was comforting. A bit of pain for his agitation to funnel out through. He hugged himself tightly.

"Crawling things in walls," Johnny laughed stiffly. "Bad shit, that's what. Do you know what those things fucking do? Do you know what it did to me? I can't have a-a baby version of one floating around, that's for damned sure."

Edgar was holding both hands out in front of him now. "What if we just - "

_Splat_!

The noise interrupted both Edgar's pleading and Johnny's scratching. The tense discussion between them disintegrated as they both cast about for the source. Gaz must have managed to sneak past Edgar's feet while they were talking, because she'd reclaimed the spot near the wall where they'd been painting.

Relief settled warmly over Johnny's sick stomach when he looked for the creepy octopus-but-not creature. It was gone. In its place was a tiny, upside-down handprint, smeared at the edges with several colors of paint. Gaz looked disinterestedly between her own paint-coated hand and the stamp she'd planted on the wall to cover her sketch. The drawing below was completely obscured by fingerpaints. Long dribbles of paint ran down the wall and stained the baseboards.

Gaz tore her gaze from her hands and looked up at Johnny, her eyes narrowed and her expression still and unreadable.

"Tha-" Johnny started to say, but before he could get the word out Gaz had gathered up her giraffe with her clean hand and stormed quietly out of the living room. He saw the edge of her overalls disappear into the hallway, followed by the unmistakable creaking of a door being drawn closed.

Edgar and he stared after her.

"What was that about?" Johnny asked

"You didn't like her painting," Edgar said, a little shortly.

"Oh. Well, I mean..." Johnny picked at the bloody spot on his arm while Edgar pretended not to stare at it. "It wasn't anything personal. You've got to understand. There was something wrong with that picture. It's much better now."

"Still. She thinks a lot of you, you know." And even though Edgar was still looking wistfully at the closed bedroom door down the hall, and even though he spoke offhandedly, Johnny still felt suddenly very uncomfortable.

"She's a bad judge of character," he repeated darkly.

Edgar ignored this, running a hand through his hair. "I ought to go check on her. It'll just take a minute. Will you be okay?"

"I...I guess."

"Thanks."

Johnny had no idea why Edgar would thank him for this. He only looked at the ground and scraped the toes of his boots together as Edgar disappeared after Gaz into her room.

/\\/\\/\\/\\

Edgar had rarely had his own room as a child, but he'd still hated it whenever people barged into whatever broom closet or laundry room he'd slept in without knocking. Ownership of even the tiniest plot of space meant very much to an uprooted child. So he stood outside of Gaz's door, knocked three times, and then waited for a loud grunt that indicated he was allowed to enter.

His guest bedroom was all but unrecognizable anymore. The tacky floral duvet on the bed was the same, if only because he resented the idea of buying one with ponies on it, but everywhere else was the touch of a little girl. Gaz's little plastic toys and blocks and books seemed to have seeped by osmosis throughout the whole room. One of the shelves that used to hold tacky knickknacks was now lined neatly with stuffed animals that leered down over the bed below. Some of her tiny skirts and tee-shirts and jackets were wadded up in corners or strewn over furniture (Edgar had let Gaz pick out all of them, having no idea what children liked to wear - as a result virtually none of her outfits matched).

It occurred to him that he ought to buy her some posters or paintings before she got the idea to draw all over the walls in here, too.

But not right now.

He looked for Gaz amidst the pastel wreckage. She'd set herself up on the bed and was poking at the eyes of that stuffed giraffe that he didn't remember buying but that she'd taken quite a liking to.

"Hi," Edgar said quietly, shutting the door behind him as he stepped into her room. He had to shuffle as he walked to avoid stepping on any toys - one plastic triceratops horn rammed an inch into his heel had been quite enough to teach him to be careful.

Gaz didn't look up at him. "Hi."

She rarely made eye contact, and Edgar had learned not to take offense at this. It certainly didn't mean that she wasn't listening.

"Is everything alright in here?"

"Yeah," she said, scooting the giraffe around on her sheets. Every once and a while she'd make a quiet roaring sound for it.

Edgar sat down at the foot of the bed, grabbing a stuffed cat off of the shelf and turning it over in his hands just for something to occupy him. "I didn't know that giraffes could roar."

"The big ones can," Gaz explained.

"My mistake. I hope what Johnny said didn't upset you too much. I don't really think he meant anything by it." Edgar felt self-conscious speaking about Johnny when he was only out in the living room, but the door was shut and the TV was on so he probably couldn't hear. It's not like he was saying anything bad.

"It's okay. I didn't really like it either," she said, sounding disinterested as always but maybe - and Edgar couldn't be sure - still the slightest bit despondent. She refused to look at him.

"Why not?" he asked, trying to do the same and focusing on the stuffed cat in his hands instead. He turned its fuzzy ears inside out. Maybe she felt uncomfortable with him always watching her. She was just such a difficult child to read; he wondered constantly if he wasn't missing something in her body language.

"It wasn't what I wanted to draw. Nny says that art works that way sometimes."

"I'm sure he would know," Edgar said, nodding appreciatively. The artistic process certainly wasn't something he had a good grasp of.

Gaz seemed finished with the conversation, because instead of answering him she pointed aggressively at the toy in his hands. Apparently the giraffe needed a partner. He handed it over and was unsurprised when she immediately had them fight each other, button eyes smashing together and punctuated with tiny snarling sounds.

"Okay, as long as you're not upset. We can talk about it later if you want," although Edgar sensed he was saying this mostly for his own benefit. "Oh, by the way. Pizza for dinner tonight?"

Gaz sat bolt upright, finally giving him a look at her eyes. The stuffed toys stood suspended mid-attack.

"Yes! Pizza! With bacon! And ham!" she squeaked.

"Geez. Little carnivore, aren't you? Is it alright if I ask Johnny to stay?" and the instant Edgar said it he wondered what on earth he was thinking. "Sure," Gaz said, eternally unshakeable. "I guess."

She let him ruffle her hair as he left the room, and Edgar was at least a little relieved that Johnny's distaste for contact and affection hadn't yet rubbed off on her. He liked having something to fuss over and care about, regardless of the drama it brought with it - he kept her safe and he liked to think that she had some vague affection for him as well, though certainly not as flashy.

Johnny fit in there somehow too, though unevenly. Speaking of which. Now it was time for a certainly-awkward invitation to be extended. His aggressive politeness was going to get them both killed. Johnny's mini-fit in the living room hadn't done much to soothe his unease around the maniac, even if they seemed to have had an overall pleasant day together.

Edgar shut the door to Gaz's room as he stepped out into the hallway, assuming she might want some time to herself. He called out ahead of him as he headed for the living room.

"Johnny? Do you like pizza? I think that Gaz and I might - "

But the rest of the apartment was empty. Johnny had been standing near the television before, and now he was gone. Edgar started to search warily around his corners, but a quiet _thump-thump-thump_ coming from past the kitchen distracted him. The front door was open, swinging on its hinges, with the doorknob banging against the wall behind it.

Sighing in something like relief, Edgar walked over and closed it. All the deadbolts and slip-locks had to be in place before he was satisfied.

Just the two of them for dinner, then.

* * *

_Lyrics are, once again, from the inscrutable Alkaline Trio, and their song "Love Love, Kiss Kiss." _

_I'll admit I don't understand much about painting – most of my art is limited to sketchbooks and computer programs, so maybe I was totally off the wall (no pun intended) about the painting process. Sorry about that. Also, on a totally unrelated note, we're very nearly to Chapter 8, AKA one of my favorite chapters in the story, so I'm very excited about posting that one next week. I've got four final exams this coming week, and it won't even be the end of my academic semester, so I'm looking forward to posting Chapter 8 as a sort of reward for myself. Hopefully you all will like it too!_

_Thank you for reading, guys! If you all wanted to leave some reviews, I'd really appreciate it. I know that you all are out there reading; I can see the numbers on my Story Stats page. It'd just take you all a second, and it would really mean a whole lot to me. No, I don't have any intention of doing that tacky "REVIEW FOR MORE" thing; I've already written the story, after all. It would just be a nice gesture, is all. To those of you who have reviewed: Love you, darlings!_


	8. Picture Book

**Chapter 8: Picture Book**

_"I have given you the blood and the truth from the wounds that they laid on me  
And whatever they left, I kept it for my own heart  
And the lonesome understand with the choirs in my head  
We were orphans before we were ever the sons of regret, my baby  
On and on and on, how the alphabet boys carry on  
And we were orphans before we were ever the sons in the songs."_

If Edgar had to guess, he'd have predicted that they had seen the last of Johnny. Then again, this relied on Johnny having behavior that followed a logical and predictable pattern, which was not even a little bit true.

Edgar grew fonder of the painting on the wall as days went by; it provided him something very interesting to look at when his mind wandered during cartoon marathons with Gaz or the lonely few hours at night between her bedtime and his. (The glass of wine that accompanied this helped, but not as much as it once had.)

He would wonder, later, if having this piece of Johnny in his apartment was what made it easier to deal with having Johnny himself there.

Things were quiet around the apartment for about a week after the Painting Incident before Johnny started showing up at the door again. (Edgar wondered if Johnny had thought that that was a long enough apologetic period or if he'd just forgotten the whole thing.) If there was a schedule to Johnny's appearances, then it would have taken the greatest statisticians in the country to figure it out.

Sometimes he knocked at the door in the morning during breakfast, and Gaz would convince him to eat a bowl of oatmeal or some peanut butter toast. Sometimes he'd forgo knocking on the door at all and Edgar would be coming out of the bathroom only to find him and Gaz laughing uproariously at the same distasteful commercial as they sat side-by-side on the couch. And sometimes Johnny would stop by very late at night and they would end up playing chess together on the kitchen table in total silence because neither were exceptional conversationalists and, in all honesty, Johnny sometimes acted reluctant to leave.

At first Johnny tried to explain why he was there. "The house is being an asshole," was the most common excuse. "I'm tired of always talking to people who are either dead or jerkoffs," was another. "I'm bored," always managed to make Edgar feel good about himself.

Finally Edgar started just waving him in with a sigh. "It's fine, Johnny. You don't have to explain yourself. Come in."

Johnny stood in the doorway, running his thumb along the strap of the backpack slung over one shoulder.

He glanced around the kitchen with wide-eyed confusion, as if not sure how he'd gotten there. "I brought Nintendo," he said, the way someone about to ask for directions might explain that they were lost.

"Really? I don't think I've ever played it. Gaz will certainly like to give it a try, I think." Edgar stepped around Johnny to shut the door behind him, being sure to give him plenty of space. He'd figured out that Johnny didn't like being approached too quickly or surrounded.

"You don't have any video games? At all?" Johnny sounded scandalized.

"I'm surprised," Edgar said, reaching for a glass out of the cabinet, "that it's taken you this long to figure out how spectacularly boring I am."

Less so in the past month, what with all the screaming ladies on the phone and the children and murderers, but still fairly boring.

"Well, yeah. Still, you might like some of them. I've got Super Kicky Fighter 2, and the original Arson-Murder-Jaywalk. They're both really gory; it's so awesome."

"Maybe I'll try one out, then. After all, I _am_ a tremendous fan of violence, not to mention mindless entertainment," Edgar said, his words tinged with sarcasm so subtle he was almost proud of himself. That is, until he cast a look back a Johnny and felt suddenly sick at the cold expression on the other man's face. Edgar looked down and busied himself with getting a cup of tea.

"They're not for you, anyway. They're for Gaz," Johnny said slowly. His eyes never left Edgar's back, making him itchy and uncomfortable.

"I know. I'm sorry, that was rude of me. And I really do appreciate it - it's good for her to have a friend who knows how to play games. I mostly just play 'read books quietly' and 'midnight chess.'"

When he turned around from the teakettle he half expected Johnny to be holding a knife, and was relieved to see that he wasn't. Just his grungy backpack and a confused look on his face.

"Yeah. It was pretty close last time. You gave up your rook way too soon." Johnny must have been very distracted by whatever was going on inside his head, because when Edgar silently offered him a mug of tea, he took it.

"Thank you," he said, staring intently down at the mug.

"Oh, if I'd known you were going to drink any I'd have made the good kind. I've got this stuff over here from India that I -"

Johnny's eyes never left the tea in his hand. "No. Thanks for apologizing. People do that all the time, but they never mean it."

"For future reference," Edgar said, taking a sip of his own tea to disguise his shaking hands, "I always mean it. Really, Johnny."

Nodding, Johnny set his mug down on the table, untouched, as if he'd picked it up on accident. Still no eye contact. Between Johnny and Gaz you'd think that Edgar had the most interesting walls in the universe.

"I know. So where's Gaz?" he asked, shaking his head a bit.

"Oh, right, sorry. She's in the living room. There's some show on about alien pig men or - or pig alien men. I don't really get it, to be honest."

"You mean Transporkers?!" Johnny's face lit up and he managed almost two full seconds of eye contact. "That show is hilarious! I hope it's the one where Staroink has indigestion."

And in a flurry of nearly-spilled tea, Johnny abandoned him in the kitchen. Not that Edgar particularly blamed him; alien pigmen were considerably more interesting than he imagined his conversation was. He sighed, set down his mug, and followed Johnny into the living room.

"Video games!" Johnny said to Gaz, and looked immensely pleased with himself when she managed to tear her eyes from the TV long enough to stare at him in awe.

"What?"

"Video games," he repeated. Johnny whipped his backpack around and tore it open, holding up a dusty old slate-colored cartridge that Edgar thought he vaguely remembered from somewhere in his youth.

Gaz hurled herself from the sofa and crowded around Johnny's ankles, the cartoons forgotten as she reached for Johnny's backpack. "C'mon, I want to see."

"Calm down, you little cretin. I've got to set the goddamned thing up first. Hold up."

With that, Johnny dumped the contents of his backpack out onto the floor. Things scattered about; a switchblade, a pencil of eyeliner, bandages, video game cartridges, all clattering onto Edgar's carpet with little ceremony. He spent a few seconds fishing out the things that interested him. The Nintendo and its accoutrements, primarily. The rest of it he left in a gritty pile on the floor.

"Would you mind picking that up?" Edgar asked. It was instinctive, the way he'd ask Gaz the same thing. The words weren't long out of his mouth when it occurred to him how stupid they were.

_That's it, Edgar. Ask the maniac to tidy up. Perhaps he'll want to tidy up your intestines afterward._

Johnny half-turned to him, already midway through plugging in the Nintendo, and looked like he was about to say something before Gaz cut him off.

"We're playing video games, Egar!" She whined, even though the controller she was holding wasn't plugged in to anything. The TV screen still blinked "A/V IN."

"But -"

"Later," Gaz said.

Edgar looked to Johnny for some response, but he'd wedged himself behind the television set while hooking up the game console. Only his striped, skinny back was visible. Fine. Let them have their fun. He sighed the slightest bit and started picking up Johnny's things.

"Johnny, I'm going to put some of your stuff over here on the side table, okay? I don't want anyone to step on this knife," he called.

"'Kay," Johnny answered from behind the T.V., sounding not even the slightest bit interested. The screen flickered once or twice before finally springing into color with a fizz-click sound. "Doomtastic Doom 3" shone the garish colors of its title screen.

Gaz sat down cross-legged in front of the set, her controller jittering excitedly in her lap. "This game looks cool."

"It is." Johnny took a spot on the floor beside her, holding his own controller in spindly fingers. "If you get a shotgun then you can explode the zombie's heads with it."

"That's what I want to do."

"Dibs on the katana, then."

Edgar rolled his eyes at their gaming. Not that either one even noticed him at the moment; the TV's flickering glow reflected on each of their pale and spellbound faces, leaving Edgar quite out of the loop. That was fine with him. Childish and impulsive Johnny was a far better playmate for Gaz than Edgar could hope to be, insane though he was.

If Edgar had a forte, it was being responsible and fussy. On that he never wavered.

With this in mind Edgar continued to tidy up Johnny's things that he'd left haphazardly in a pile on the floor. Edgar carefully folded up the switchblade before setting it on the little table next to the sofa. A few other things followed suit - a spool of thread, a few tiny and dirty bones (_eugh_), a plastic toy soldier that must have been decades old, and finally -

The last object had been buried beneath everything else. Edgar picked it up by the edges, not sure how to feel about his discovery.

It was a small photo album. The cover was red, made out of cheap plastic, but nowhere on the outside could Edgar see a label that said "Family Picnic '97" or "Girls Who Wronged Me" or anything else helpful or disturbing. He'd read before that some serial killers kept trophies of each of their killings - ears or personal objects or, yes, even photographs. Is that what he was holding? Johnny's murderous bookkeeping?

Edgar glanced over at where Johnny and Gaz were playing video games. Both of them had that glazed-over, focused look that meant a bomb could go off in the kitchen and neither would notice; necks craned back, eyes unblinking, only the slightest motion as they pounded buttons. Johnny was gnawing on his bottom lip and looked uncharacteristically childlike. If Edgar didn't know any better, he could have mistaken the two of them for siblings.

Edgar banked on Johnny's game-addled child-state to protect him as he opened the album, preparing for horrors. He expected Polaroid snapshots of blood and gore, shiny organs on basement floors, stalker-photos of girls at bookstores -

But no. Edgar flipped through the first dozen or so pages, the cheap plastic sleeves sticking to his fingers, and what he saw was somehow even more jarring.

They were family photographs. One showed a little Johnny in a tee-shirt with a kitten on it celebrating his fifth birthday. School pictures across several years, with Johnny looking gradually more disgruntled in every one. One of the Polaroids showed a very young Johnny at the beach, coated in sand and sunscreen and wailing as an older boy tried to hand him a wad of seaweed. The other boy had Johnny's erratic black hair and skinny build, but he wore glasses.

Edgar slid this picture out of its protector and looked at the back. Someone had written "Johnny and Roger at Luckaduck Beach, 1975" in tidy, neat handwriting. Likely a woman's. The idea of Johnny having a mother banged around strangely in his head. Edgar knew consciously that there was no way Johnny could have just been summoned into existence by whatever dark forces he seemed to fight with, but still...

He'd been a child once. Had an older brother, from the looks of it. Gone to school, had birthday parties, been normal. Several people had loved him. Edgar himself had barely had any of those things. It was a window that Edgar wasn't sure he was totally comfortable looking into.

He looked over at Johnny again and wondered what possible force in the universe could have turned any child into...into _that_. The killer had his back to Edgar on the couch, still totally entranced by whatever pixelated carnage was going on on-screen. There was a spray of blood on the TV, followed by a chorus of angry groans from the two gamers. Gaz threw her controller onto the floor, crossing her arms over her chest in a huff.

"That level was stupid," she said, while the "GAME OVER" screen asked them urgently if they'd like to try again.

"I know, right? What was with the werewolf showing up RIGHT AFTER a boss battle? That's not fair! That's shitty, anti-player level design." Johnny dropped his own controller next to Gaz's. "Thank Senior Diablo that we were in co-op mode."

Edgar had expected them to start up another round. He hadn't expected Johnny to yawn, stretch his back with a wide range of horrific cracking sounds, and then turn around to look at him.

"What's that?" Johnny asked, nodding toward the book in Edgar's hands.

Edgar glanced, panicked, between the two of them before setting the album down onto the sofa cushion next to him. Being associated with the thing suddenly felt very damning. "Oh, nothing. It was just - just something I found in your -"

Johnny got to his feet and walked over to examine the little book. Behind him Gaz trailed at his heels, looking somewhat resentful at having her video games interrupted over some silly adult business.

As Johnny flipped through the album, Edgar inched as far away into the corner of the sofa as he could. Johnny's expression was blank-mixed-with-confused, his brow furrowed ever so slightly and his teeth visible as he bit his lip. Or snarled, Edgar couldn't quite tell. Every twitch in Johnny's face seemed to foretell a future rage.

Even Gaz was quiet, no whining or requests coming from her despite her annoyed state. There was only the sound of the sticky plastic pages being turned in Johnny's hands. The silence was terrifying.

"What is this?" Johnny finally spoke, his gaze sliding very slowly over to Edgar and his face impossible to read.

It took Edgar a second or two to get his words together; his mouth seemed to have gone completely dry. "It's a photo album. Your photo album, I think. I'm really sorry, I shouldn't have looked through it. I wasn't trying to pry, it was just right there and I -"

"I don't remember any of this." Johnny was staring back down at the album again. His voice was quiet and distant, but Edgar tried to prepare himself for the menace that might leak back into it at any second.

"I want to see," Gaz said from Johnny's ankles. She clambered up onto the sofa by Edgar's side, trying to peer at the album and oblivious to Edgar's mental urging that she go hide in her room. Johnny ignored her. He seemed only vaguely aware of either of them.

"I mean, this must have happened. This is me in these pictures. But I don't remember this house. Or this guy, who is this?" Johnny let them see what photo they were talking about; it was one that featured a little Johnny and his big brother as the two of them worked on what looked like a baking-soda volcano together in a messy, Formica-coated kitchen.

"Your older brother, I think. Someone wrote on the back of one that his name is 'Roger.' Does that name mean anything to you?" Edgar said, wanting to help if he could. Anything that kept Johnny still.

After a few seconds of silence, he shook his head. "No." A humorless laugh. "I had a brother. That's...that's very weird to think about. Even for me, and I think about the different colors that human spleens come in."

"You probably still _have_ a brother, you know. He doesn't look too much older than you."

Edgar tilted down the edge of the album in Johnny's hands to get a better look at some of the pictures, and in response Johnny collapsed onto the other end of the couch. It took several seconds for Edgar's heart to crawl back down into his chest after such an explosion of movement, but he at least managed not to yelp.

"Yeah, maybe so," Johnny conceded, handing the album to Gaz to flip through. "I doubt he'd have any interest in talking to me, though."

"_I_ like talking to you," she said, in that same matter-of-fact tone that didn't even hint of affection.

Johnny didn't smile, but something flickered on his face for an instant or two before fading. Whatever it was settled Edgar's uneasiness.

"So you've never looked through this before? This album?" he asked, trying not to laugh at a page in the book that showed baby Johnny coated in birthday cake.

"I guess...I mean- I can't exactly remember where it came from, no. Lots of things - lots of things are like that." Johnny's eyes flicked back and forth, flexing his clawed fingers against his knees. "Big chunks of my memory are missing. I can piece together the last few years, but everything before...it's all blank or hazy. That - that book. It must have been from the blank part."

The way that Johnny stared at the pictures - with confusion and detachment - seemed to confirm this. There was no flash of resentment over a traumatic childhood, or doe-eyed look of longing for something lost. It must have been frightening to be so robbed of context, even if that context itself was unpleasant.

Worst of all, Edgar thought, as he looked through pictures with Gaz, was that Johnny's childhood didn't seem all that horrible. Not that Edgar wished a harsh upbringing on him - he'd gotten too used to the maniac for that - but it just seemed cruel of the universe to have twisted the black-haired kid in the Poloroids into something so unrecognizable.

"You look cool here," Gaz mentioned, jarring the two grown men on either side of her out of their respective brooding. Edgar shifted himself a bit on the couch to get a better look at the picture she was talking about.

"Cool? How so?"

"You've got a cool coat."

Indeed, the Johnny in this picture was wearing a long, black trench coat, even though the picture seemed to have been taken in summertime.

This was the first one where Johnny looked like Nny. The setting was someone's backyard, washed out with summer sunlight and scattered with brightly-dressed people at a cookout. Johnny was leaning on a picket fence at the very edge of the frame. It was impossible to miss him; he was the only one wearing black. His dingy hair was much longer and more unkempt than it had looked in any of the earlier pictures, and he was glaring daggers at the person taking the picture. Brother Roger was there too, standing at Johnny's side, with thick glasses and hair even wilder than his brother's, but a much more photogenic smile. They must have both been well into their teenage years, because their heights had nearly evened out.

"Do you even remember being a teenager?" Edgar asked, as Johnny leaned forward to look over Gaz's shoulder. He wrinkled his nose at the sight of his former self.

"No. Just little flashes without any context. Being beaten up behind a mall, getting in trouble for drawing in class, that kind of thing." Edgar winced and for once was glad that Johnny wasn't looking at him. "It doesn't look like it was a pleasant time, though. Maybe I'm better off not remembering it," Johnny said bitterly.

"No one enjoys being a teenager. It's unpleasant for everyone, I promise."

Johnny raised an eyebrow. "Speaking from experience?"

"Absolutely," Edgar said, with no intention of elaborating. Johnny eyed him from over Gaz's head, who was still bent over the photo album and likely oblivious to their conversation. Her interruption was very welcome.

"This is the last one. You're not even in it, Nny." She sounded disappointed. "Who's this kid?" she asked, shoving the book into Johnny's lap and forcing Edgar to lean over her to see the final photo.

It was the simplest of the bunch, and the only picture that looked to have been staged in a studio. A much older Roger was centered in the frame, with a little boy by his side. Both of them had the same crazy black hair and thick glasses. There was no sign of a mother. Edgar thought that he might be seeing Johnny's hard-eyed sadness on Roger's face - the resemblance between them was undeniable - but perhaps he was just projecting.

He tended to do that, after all.

Meanwhile, Johnny was gawking blankly at the album on his knees. Any answer he tried to give was probably more for his own sake than for answering Gaz's question.

"I don't know, okay?! I don't know. Fuck, this must have been so recent, too. That goddamned house cut out so much of me and left the worst parts behind," Johnny whined. He laced his spindly fingers through his hair and folded himself up into a little ball in the corner of the sofa. Next to Gaz he looked by far the most childlike and frightened.

Edgar tried to help. "It looks like your nephew, Johnny. See? You've got a whole family out there, somewhere."

Johnny glared out at him from between his fingers and strands of black hair. "Huh. That's probably why I've never met my brother. He wants to keep his son safe from me."

"You don't know that. And even if it's true, he's clearly wrong. Gaz is pretty safe with you, after all."

And Gaz shrugged and then nodded and then prodded the curled-up Johnny in the stomach as if she were trying to unroll an armadillo.

"Yup. Still alive," she said, as Johnny peered out at her.

Something about this stuck Edgar as being funny - maybe it was the way that Johnny had his head twisted down between his knees, or the fact that Gaz was so tiny and already grasped sarcasm - but he laughed at both of them. Hard enough that he felt obligated to cover his face with one hand as they both turned and gave him unappreciative looks.

"I'm sorry," he wiped at his eyes. "I'm not laughing at you, I promise."

"Yeah, that's what it seemed like," Johnny said darkly.

"Oh, don't get so bent out of shape, please?" Edgar tried. "At least I didn't laugh at any of your pictures. Much."

Gaz continued glaring at him and let Johnny answer. "I bet none of yours are any better. Not that I'd know, because you don't have any. Weirdo. I thought normal people were supposed to have gross pictures of their family all over the place? Don't you have any embarrassing photographs?"

Johnny swept his hands across the width of the living room, indicating the inhuman barrenness of the place. Edgar felt the laugh die in his chest and knew that Johnny was exactly right. It was sort of unnerving to have the psychopath correct you on normal human social behavior.

"Just the one. It's not very embarrassing, though. Not as bad as your summer-trench-coat-barbecue picture, anyway."

"Hm? Where? I want to see. We just spent half an hour going over my childhood shame, now I want to see yours."

"There's not much to see. Really. I just have this one picture -"

"It's over there." Gaz cut him off, pointing. "On the bookshelf."

Edgar raised his eyebrows at her, because he'd never drawn attention to the photograph. Oh, of course, he noticed and looked at it all the time, but Gaz had never really shown any interest in his sentimental things, few though they were. She was a frighteningly focused child.

And yet she'd noticed the photo on the shelf. It wasn't even at her eye level.

But it was at Johnny's, Edgar realized a bit late, because he had already taken it down and was staring intently at the little framed photo.

"Huh," Johnny said, after a bit. "You looked like a dork." He brought the picture over to the couch with him and fell into his former spot with a barely-noticeable _thunk_.

"That's saying quite a lot, coming from Prince of the Damned over there. Tell me, after you buy ten bottles of black nail polish, is the eleventh free?"

Johnny gave him such a filthy look that Edgar knew immediately that he'd overstepped his boundaries. He even bared one or two teeth. The sick twisting stomach-drop of a mistake fought with nausea in his stomach, and Edgar inched himself down into the corner of the couch, as far away from Johnny as he could manage. He tried to gather up Gaz with him, but she was already leaning over Johnny's lap to look at the picture in the frame.

Edgar noticed that Johnny let her plant a hand on his knee to balance herself. At least one of them was definitely safe.

After a while, Johnny asked evenly: "Who's this girl with you?"

Edgar remembered the picture well enough that he didn't need to look. It was the blandest picture imaginable, after all - just he and Abigail at the park when they were younger, sitting on a bench side-by-side - but it remained all he had.

"That's my sister, Abby. We were thirteen and eleven, I think."

"I thought she was your girlfriend." Johnny turned the picture over as if he expected for there to be something else on the back of the frame, and then scrutinized the front of it again.

"No. I was a dork, remember?"

Johnny didn't smile, but Gaz did. "You're still a dork."

"Thank you for your input, Gazzy. You'd do well to remember that it's the dorks who buy the ice cream in this house, though," he said, glaring across the sofa at her with mock severity and failing even at that. Gaz wrinkled up her nose at him and stuck out her tongue as if she meant it.

They might have sat there making mean faces at each other for quite a while if Johnny hadn't stopped them.

"What happened to her?" he asked, suddenly, still staring at the picture of Dork Edgar and his little sister with the curly brown hair and a squinty smile.

Edgar heard his voice falter as he spoke. "What do you mean?"

"Well, this is an old picture. There must not be any newer ones. Right?" Johnny cast an eye over at him, whites shining, looking genuinely interested. Gaz too.

"...right," Edgar said quietly.

"So what happened?"

Both of them were watching him now, waiting for an answer. Edgar felt his fingers start to get hot and tingly with a different type of nervousness. He disliked talking about himself enough as it was - if he had any identity at all, it was as a listener - and the topic that they'd chosen wasn't making things any easier.

Finally, he managed to work out: "She died unexpectedly when I was a teenager. That's the last picture of the two of us, to my knowledge. We were very close."

"Oh. That's too bad," Johnny whispered, his face contorted into that look of sadness and confusion that Edgar hated to see on anyone else, but was especially bad on Johnny. That was why he never talked about himself. People just always became so awkward and strange afterward.

Edgar never thought he would be so glad that Johnny was already awkward and strange.

"I thought all people were dreadful little goblins who deserved to die?" Edgar asked, because he was genuinely surprised to see Johnny's expression of sympathy, no matter how vague it might be. The uncomfortableness of the conversation wasn't helping.

"Huh? Oh, right. I said that, didn't I? Generally it's true. _Generally_. I stand by that. I didn't know your sister, though." Johnny tapped the picture once before handing it back to Edgar. "She was probably like you."

Edgar supposed that this was a compliment. He smiled and got to his feet to put the frame back in its proper place on the bookshelf - having it so removed had been bothering him tremendously.

Behind him, he heard Gaz softly ask: "How?"

"How what?"

"How...how did she..." When he turned to look, Gaz was staring hard at the carpet, kicking her heels against the sofa cushions, her voice growing quieter with every word. "You know..."

And Edgar realized with a bit of a shuttering start that he wasn't the only person in the room who'd lost someone very close to him in a very bad way. They were a family of orphans, all three of them. Worst of all was that even that common ground between them wasn't enough to make Edgar feel at ease talking about himself.

He wasn't used to similarity or sympathy because those things required intimate interactions with other human beings, which up until the last month or so, he'd managed to swear off completely. It felt very strange, this kind of shared vulnerability, especially with Killer Johnny involved. Although Edgar sensed (perhaps sickly) that he would feel just as weird even if a sane person were there.

He also realized that he liked Gaz far too much to tell her the truth.

"That's a story for another day," he said.

Gaz started to fuss. "But -"

"You heard what Edgar said. Let it go." Johnny cut her off, his voice more firm than harsh. Edgar caught his little up-nod and was infinitely grateful for it.

"Hmph. Fine. Whatever," Gaz whined, crossing her arms over her chest and not looking at either one of them. She'd lose interest in the whole thing soon, Edgar figured, and then he wouldn't feel so badly.

"Weren't you two playing video games?" he tried. Distraction. Good. And it must have worked, because she hopped of the couch, with Johnny trailing close behind.

"Right! We've only got this last wave of zombies before we get a weapon upgrade," Johnny yelped. He threw himself onto the floor into a Lotus position and Gaz fell alongside him, followed by the rapid clicking of buttons and the game's techno garbage disposal soundtrack.

Within seconds they were both lost to him.

Edgar walked carefully around them on his way to the couch, intending to replace Johnny's photo album in his bag. For a second or two he hesitated, holding it above the backpack's zippered maw. Nny was ignoring him, lost in a world of marauding zombies. Surely he wouldn't notice, especially not if he hadn't known the album existed in the first place.

So instead Edgar stepped silently over to his bookshelf and slid the album into an open slot right behind his photograph of Abigail.

* * *

_Song lyrics above credit to the Gaslight Anthem, my favorite band of all time. This week, anyway. I'm pretty fond of this chapter, for reasons even I'm not sure of. I dunno, it feels kind of sweet to me. Therefore I'd love to hear what you thought! It's spectacular getting feedback on things you like. It's also my personal opinion that it's from this chapter on that things get "interesting." More of the major plot milestones start coming up, the family gets a bit closer, there's actual (god forbid) action, etc. So if you've held on this long with the intro stuff, I'm really hoping you're going to get the payoff in the next few weeks._

_Love all ya'll 3_


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